The mirror of the sea

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

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OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT
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Cornell University Library
PR6005.O58M61906

The mirror of the sea.

3 1924 013 598 762

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A.^ll'fSO

Books by
JOSEPH CONRAD

NOSTEOMO. Post 8vo
THE MIRROR OF THE SEA. Post 8vo
THE SECRET AGENT. Post 8vo
UNDER WESTERN EYES. Post 8vo
A PERSONAL RECORD. Crown 8vo

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

Copyright, 1906, by Harpbe & Brotheks.
Published October, 1906,

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
B-P

Contents

fjLGE

Landfalls and Departures i

Emblems op Hope i8

The Fine Art 35

Cobwebs and Gossamer 56

The Weight of the Burden 74

Overdue and Missing 93

The Grip of the Land 109

The Character op the Foe 117

Rulers of East and West 132

The Faithful River 168

In Captivity 193

Initiation 216

The Nursery op the Craft 250

The "Tremolino" 262

The Heroic Age 310

The Mirror of the Sea

Landfalls and Departures

JANDFALL and Departure mark
I the rhythmical swing of a sea-
man's life and of a ship's ca-
reer. From land to land is
[the most concise definition of
a ship's earthly fate.

A "Departure" is not what a vain people
of landsmen may think. The term "Land-
fall" is more easily understood; you fall in
with the land, and it is a matter of a quick
eye and of a clear atmosphere. The De-
parture is not the ship's going away from
her port any more than the Landfall can
be looked upon as the synonyme of arrival.
But there is this difference in the Departure :
that the term does not imply so, much a sea
event as a definite act entailing a process —
the precise observation of certain landmarks
by means of the compass-card.

The Mirror of the Sea

Your Landfall, be it a peculiarly shaped
mountain, a rocky headland, or a stretch of
sand-dunes, you meet at first with a single
glance. Further recognition will follow in
due course ; but essentially a Landfall, good
or bad, is md,de and done with at the first cry
of "Land ho!" The Departure is distinctly
a ceremony of navigation. A ship may have
left her port some time before ; she may have
been at sea, in the fullest sense of the phrase,
for days; but^ for all that, as long as the
coast she was about to leave remained in
sight, a southern-going ship of yesterday
had not in the sailor's setlse begun the en-
terprise of a passage.

The taking of Departure, if not th^ last
sight of the land, is perhaps the last pro-
fessional recognition of the land on the part
of a sailor. It is the technical, as distin-
guished from the sentimental, "gobd-bye."
Henceforth he has done with the coast astern
of his ship. It is a matter personal to the
man. It is not the ship thdt takes her de-
parture; the seaman takes his Departui-e by
means of cross-bearings which fix the place
of the first tiny pencil-cross on the white ex-

Landfalls and Departures

panse of the track -chart, where the ship's
position at noon shall be marked by just such
another tiny pencil -cross for every day of
her passage. And there may be sixty,
eighty, any number of these crosses on the
ship's track from land to land. The great-
est number in my experience was a hundred
and thirty of such crosses from the pilot
station at the Sand Heads in the Bay of
Bengal to the Scilly's light. A bad pas-
sage. . . .

A Departure, the last professional sight of
land, is always good* or at least good enough.
For, even if the weather be thick, it does
not matter much to a ship having all the sea
open before her bows. A Landfall may be
good or bad. You encompass the earth
with one particular spot of it in your eye.
In all the devious tracings the course of a
sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a
chart she is always aiming for that one little
spot — maybe a small island in the ocean, a
single headland upon the long coast of a
continent, a light-house on a bluff, or simply
the peaked form of a mountain like an ant-
heap afloat upon the waters. But if you

3

The Mirror of the Sea

have sighted it on the expected bearing,
then thai; Landfall is good. Fogs, snow-
storms, gales thick with clouds and rain —
those are the enemies of good Landfalls.

Some commanders of ships take their De-
parture from the home coast sadly, in a
spirit of grief and discontent. They have
a wife, children perhaps, some affection at
any rate, or perhaps only some pet vice,
that must be left behind for a year or more.
I remember only one man who walked his
deck with a springy step and gave the first
course of the passage in an elated voice.
But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving
nothing behind him, except a welter of debts
and threats of legal proceedings.

On the other hand, I have known many
captains who, directly their ship had left the
narrow waters of the Channel, would dis-
appear from the sight of their ship's com-
pany altogether for some three days or more.
They would take a long div6, as it were, into
their state-room, only to emerge g, few days
4

Landfalls and Departures

afterwards with a more or less serene brow.
Those were the men easy to get on with.
Besides, such a complete retirement seemed
to imply a satisfactory amount of trust in
their officers, and to be trusted displeases no
seaman worthy of the name.

Oil my first voyage as chief mate with

good Captain MacW-; , I remember that I

felt quite fiattere37^and went blithely about
my duties, myself a commander for all prac-
tical purposes. Still, whatever the great-
ness of my illusion, the fact remained that
the real commander was there, backing up
my self-confidence, though invisible to my
eyes behind a maple-wood veneered cabin-
door with a white china handle.

That is the time, after your Departure is
taken, when the spirit of your commander
communes with you in a mufHed voice, as if
from the sanctum sanctorum of a temple;
because, call her a temple or a "hell afloat"
— as some ships have been called — the cap-
tain's state-room is surely the august place
in every vessel.

The good MacW would not even

come out to his meals, and fed solitarily in

S

The Mirror of the Sea

his holy of holies from a tray covered with
a white napkin. Our steward used to bend
.an ironic glance at the perfectly empty
plates he was bringing out from there.
"This grief for his home, which overcomes so
many married seamen, did not deprive Cap-
tain MacW of his legitimate appetite.

In fact, the steward would almost invariably
come up to me, sitting in the captain's chair
at the head of the table, to say in a grave
murmur, "The captain asks for one more
slice bf meat and two potatoes." We, his
officers, could hear him moving about in his
berth, or lightly snoring, or fetching deep
sighs; or splashing and blowing in his bath-
room; and we made our reports to him
through the key-hole, as it were. It was the
crowning achievement of his amiable char-
acter that the answers we got were given in
a quite mild and friendly tone. Some com-
manders in their periods of seclusion are con-
stantly grumpy, and seem to resent the mere
sound of your voice as an injury and an insult.
But a grumpy recluse cannot worry his
subordinates : whereas the man in whom the
sense of duty is strong (or, perhaps, only the
<5

Landfalls and Departures

sense of self-importance), and who persists
in airing on deck his moroseness all day —
and perhaps half the night — biecomes a
grievous infliction. He walks the poop
darting gloomy glances, as though he wished
to poison the sea, and snaps your head oflE
savagely whenever you happen to blunder
within ear-shot. And these vagaries are the
harder to bear patiently, as becomes a man
and an officer, because no sailor is really
good-tempered during the first few d'«,ys of,
a voyage. There are regrets, memories, the'
instinctive longing for the departed "iJSleness,
the-iastirrctire "hate of all work. Fesides,
things have a knack of goifig wrong at the
start, especially in the matter of irritating
trifles. And there is the abiding thought of
a whole year of more or less hard life before
one, because there was hardly a southern-
•going voyage in the yesterday of the sea
which meant anjrthing less than a twelve-
month. Yes ; it needed a few days after the
taking of your departure for a ship's com-
pany to shake down into their places, and
for the soothing deep-water ship routine to
establish its beneficent sway,

7

The Mirror of the Sea

It is a great doctor for sore hearts and
sore heads, too, your chip's routine, which I
have seen soothe — atTfiasFlor a time — the
most turbulent of spirits. There is health
-in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the ac-
complished rotmd; for each day of the ship's
^life seems to close a circle within the wide
ring of the sea-horizon. It borrows a cer-
tain dignity of sameness from the majestic
mofiotony of the sea. He who loves the sea
loves, also the ship's routine.

NoVk:here else than upon the sea do the
days, weeks, and months fall away quicker
into the past. They seem to be left astern
as easily as the light air -bubbles in the
swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a
great silence in which your ship moves on
with a sort of magical effect. They pass
away, the days, the weeks, the months.
Nothing but a gale can disturb the orderly
life of the ship; and the spell of unshaken
monotony that seems to have fallen upon
the very voices of her men is broken only by
the near prospect of a Landfall.

Then is the spirit of the ship's commander
stirred strongly again. But it is not moved
8

Landfalls and Departures

to seek seclusion, and to remain, hidden and
inert, shut up in a small cabin with the solace
of. a good bodily appetite. When about to
make the land, the spirit of the ship's com-
mander- is tormented by an unconquerable
restlessness. It seems unable to abide for
many seconds together in the holy of holies
of the captain's state-room; it will out on
deck and gaze ahead, through straining
eyes, as the appointed moment comes
nearer. It is kept vigorously upon the
stretch of excessive vigilance. Meantime
the body of the ship's commander is being
enfeebled by want of appetite ; at least, such
is my experience, though "enfeebled" is
perhaps not exactly the word. I might say,
rather, that it is spiritualized by a disregard
for food, sleep, and all the ordinary com-
forts, such as they are, of sea-life. In one or
two cases I have known that detachment
from the grosser needs of existence remain
regrettably incomplete in the matter of
drink.

But these two cases were, properly speak-
ing, pathological cases, and the only two in
all my sea experience. In one of these two

9

The Mirror of the Sea

instances of a craving for stimtilants, de-
veloped from sheer anxiety, I cannot assert
that the man's seaman-Kke qualities were
impaired in the least. It was a very anx-
ious case, too, the land being made sud-
denly, close-to, on a wrong bearing, in thick
weather, and during a fresh on-shore gale.
Going below to speak to him soon after, I
was unlucky enough to catch my captain in
the very act of hasty cork-drawing. The
sight, I may say, gave me an awful scare. I
was well aware of the morbidly sensitive
nature of the man. Fortunately, I man-
aged to draw back unseen, and, taking care
to stamp heavily with my sea-boots at the
foot of the cabin stairs, I made my second
entry. But for this unexpected glimpse, no
act of his during the next twenty-four hours
could have given me the slightest suspicion
that aU was not well with his nerve.

Quite another case, and having nothing
to do with drink, was that of poor Captain
B . He used to sufEer from sick head-

10

Landfalls and Departures

aches, in his young days, every time he was
approaching a coast. Well over fifty years
of age when I knew him, short, stout, dig-
nified, perhaps a little pompous, he was a
man of a singularly well-informed mind, the
least sailor-like in outward aspect, but cer-
tainly one of the best seamen whom it has
been my good luck to serve under. He was
a Plymouth man, I think, the son of a
country doctor, and both his elder boys were
studying medicine. He cottimanded- a big
London ship, fairly well known in her day.
I thought no end of him, and that is why I
remember with a peculiar satisfaction the
last words he spoke to me on board his ship
after an eighteen months' voyage. It was
in the dock in Dundee, where we had
brought a full cargo of jute from Calcutta.
We had been paid off that morning, and I
had come on board to take my sea-chest
away and to say good-bye. In his slightly
Ipfty but courteous way he inquired what
were my plans. I replied that I intended
leaving fOr London by the afternoon train,
and thought of going up for examination to
get my master's certificate. I had just

The Mirror of the Sea

enough service for that. He commended me
for not wasting my time, with such an evi-
dent interest in my case that I was quite
surprised; then, rising from his chair, he
said:

" Have you a ship in view after you have
passed?"

I answered that I had nothing whatever
in view.

He shook hands with me, and pronounced
the memorable words :

" If you happen to be in want of employ-
ment, remember that as long as I have a
ship you have a ship, too."

In the way of compliment there is nothing
to beat this from a ship's captain to his
second mate at the end of a voyage, when
the work is over and the subordinate is done
with. And there is a pathos in that mem-
ory, for the poor fellow never went to sea
again after all. He was already ailing when
we passed St. Helena ; was laid up for a time
when we were off the Western Islands, but
got out of bed to make his Landfall. He
managed to keep up on deck as far as the
Downs, where, giving his orders in an ex-

12

Landfalls and Departures

hausted voice, he anchored for a few hours
to send a wire to his wife and take aboard a
North Sea pilot to help him sail the ship up
the east coast. He had not felt equal to the
task by himself, for it is the sort of thing
that keeps a deep-water man on his feet
pretty well night and day.

When we arrived in Dimdee, Mrs. B

was already there, waiting to take him
home. We travelled up to London by the
same train; but by the time I had managed
to get through with my examination the
ship had sailed on her next voyage without
him, and, instead of joining her again, I
went by request to see my old commander
in his home. This is the only one of my cap-
tains I ha ve^ ever visited in that way. He
was out of bed by then, "quite convales-
cent," as he declared, making a few tottering
steps to meet me at the sitting-room door.
Evidently he was reluctant to take his final,
cross-bearings of this earth for a Departure
on the only voyage to an unknown destina-
tion a sailor ever undertakes. And it was
all very nice — the large, sunny room; his
deep easy-chair in a bow-window, with pil-

13

The Mirror of the Sea

Iqws and a footstool; the quiet, watchful
care of the elderly, gentle woman who had
borne hiro five children, and had not, perr
baps, lived with him more than five full
years out of the thirty or so of their married
life. There was also another woman there
in a plain black dress, quite gray-haire^, sit-
ting yery erect on her chair with some sew-
ing, from whiclj she snatched side Ranees in
his direction, and uttering not a single word
dtjfing all the time pf my call, ^ven when,
in due course, I carried over to her a cup of
tea, she only nodded at me silently, with the
faintest ghost pf a sipile on her tightrset lips.
I imiagine shis vfmst have been a maiden

sister pf Mrs. B come to help nurse her

brpther-in-law. His ypungest boy, a late-
cpmer, 9, grpat cricketer it seemed, twelve
years old or thereabpi^ts, chattered enthu-
siastically of the exploits of W. G. Grace.
And I remember his eldest son, toq, a newly
fljsdgfid doctor, who took me out to smoke in
the garden, and, shaking his head with pro-
fessiqnal gravity, but with genuine concern,
mnttiered: '-Yes, hyti be doesn't get back his
appetite. I don't like that -- I don't like
14

Landfalls and Departures

tfiat at all: " Th^ last sight of Gaptaiii B-

I had Was as he nodded his head to me out
of the bow-winddw when I turned rotmd to
cltise the front gate:

) It was a distinct and complete impression^
sbirlfethihg that I don't knoW Whether to call
a Landfall Of a Dfeparture. Certaitily he had
gazfed at times very fixedly before him with
the Lahdfall's vigilant look, this sea-captain
sfeiated iiicongruoilsly in a deep-bafcked chair.
Hfe had iiot then talked to rile of employ-
rhetlt, of ships, of being ready to take an-
dther fcortlraarid; but he had discoursed of
his early days in the abundant but thin flow
of a wilful invalid's talk. Th6 women looked
worried) but sat still, and I learnfed more of
him in that interview than in the whole
eighteen months we had sailfed together. It
appeared he had "servM his time" in the
cbppei" - ore tradS, the famous copper - ore
tl-ade of old days between Swansfea and the
fchilian Coast) coal out and ore in; deep-
Ibadfed both way^i as if in wanton defiance
bf the great Gapei Horn seas — a Work, this,
i6t stanch shipsy and a great school of
StatlChtiess for West - Coiihtry seamen. A

IS

The Mirror of the Sea

whole fleet of copper-bottomed barks, as
strong in rib and planking, as well found in
gear, as ever was sent upon the seas, manned
by hardy crews and commanded by yoting
masters, was engaged in that now long-de-
funct trade. "That was the school I was
trained in," he said to me almost boastfully,
lying back among his pillows with a rug over
his legs. And it was in that trade that he
obtained his first command at a very early
age. It was then that he mentioned to me
how, as a young commander, he was always
ill for a few days before making land after
a long passage. But this sort of sickness
used to pass off with the first sight of a fa-
miliar landmark. Afterwards, he added, as
he grew older, all that nervousness wore off
completely; and I observed his weary eyes
gaze steadily ahead, as if there had been
nothing between him and the straight line of
sea and sky, where whatever a seaman is
looking for is first bound to appear. But I
have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon the
faces in the room, upon the pictures on the
wall, upon all the familiar objects of that
home, whose abiding and clear image must
i6

Landfalls and Departures

have flashed often on his memory in times
of stress and anxiety at sea. Was he look-*^
ing out for a strange Landfall, or taking
with an untroubled mind the bearings for,
his last Departure?

It is hard to say; for in that voyage from
which no man retxu-ns Landfall and De-
parttire are instantaneous, merging togeth-
er into one moment of supreme and final
attention. Certainly I do not remember
observing any sign of faltering in the set
expression of his wasted face, no hint of
the nervous anxiety of a young commander
about to make land on an uncharted shore.
He had had too much experience of De-
partures and Landfalls. And had he not
"served his time" in the famous copper-ore
trade out of the Bristol Channel, the work
of the stanchest ships afloat, and the school
of stanch seamen ?

Emblems of Hope

^EFORE an anchoi- can ever be
raised, it must bfe Ifet go; arid
this perfectly obvious trttism
briiigs me at once to the sttb-
, jfect of the degradatiorl of the
sea - laiiguagfe in the daily press of this
country.

Your joiirnalist, whether he takes charge
df a ship or a fleet, almost invariably " casts"
his aiichor. Now, an anchor is never cast,
" and to td,ke a liberty -virith technical language
is a crime against the clearness, precision;
and beauty of perfected spefech.

An anchor is a forged piece of iron, ad-
mirably adapted to its end, and technical
language is an instrument wrought into per-
fection by ages of experience, a flawless
thing for its purpose. An anchor of yester-
day (because nowadays there are contriv-
i8

Emblems of Hbpe

ances like mushrooms and things like claws,
of nd particular exprfession or shape — ^just
hooks) — ^an anchor of yesterday is in its way
a most efficient instrument. To its perfec-
tion its size bears witness, for there is no
other appliance so small for the great work
it has to do. Ldok at the ailchors hangirig
from the cat-heads of a big ship! How tiny
they stre in proportion to the great size of
the huU! Were they made of gold they
would look like trinkets, like ornamental
toys, no bigger in proportion than a jewelled
drop in at woman's ear. And yet upon them
will depend, more than once, the very life of
the ship.

An anchor is forged ahd fashioned for
faithfulness ; give it gtound that it can bitel
and it will hold till the cable parts, and then/
A^hatever may aften^ards befall its shipj
that anchor is "lost." The honest, rough
piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has
more parts than thfe hiiinan body has limbs:
the ring, the stockj the crown, the flukes,
the palms, the shank. All this, accordirig
to the journalist, is "cast" When a ship ar-
riving at an anchorage is brought up;
19

The Mirror of the Sea

This insistence in using the odious word
arises from the fact that a partictdarly be-
nighted landsman must imagine the act of
anchoring as a process of throwing 'some-
thing overboard, whereas the anchor ready
for its work is already overboard, and is not
thrown over, but simply allowed to fall. It
hangs from the ship's side at the end of a
heavy, projecting timber called the cat-head,
in the bight of a short, thick chain whose
end link is suddenly released by a blow from
a top-maU or the ptill of a lever when the
order is given. And the order is not " Heave
over!" as the paragraphist seems to imagine,
but "Let go!"

As a matter of fact, nothing is ever cast
in that sense on board ship but the lead, of
which a cast is taken to search the depth of
water on which she floats. A lashed boat,
a spare spar, a cask or what not secured
about the decks, is "cast adrift" when it is
untied. Also the ship herself is "cast to
port or starboard" when getting under way.
She, however, never "casts" her anchor.

To speak with severe technicality, a ship
or a fleet is "brought up" — the comple-
20

Emblems of Hope

mentary words unpronounced and unwrit-
ten being, of course, "to an anchor." Less
technically, but not less correctly, the word
"anchored," with its characteristic appear-
ance and resolute sound, ought to be good
enough for the newspapers of the greatest
maritime country in the world. "The fleet
anchored at Spithead": can any one want a
better sentence for brevity and seaman-like
ring? But the "cast-anchor" trick, with its
affectation of being a sea-phrase — for why
not write just as well "threw anchor,"
"flung anchor," or "shied anchor"? — is
intolerably odious to a sailor's ear. I re-
member a coasting pilot of my early ac-
quaintance (he used to read the papers
assiduously) who, to define the utmost de-
gree of lubberliness in a landsman, used
to say ,5" He's one of them poor, miserable,
'cast-anchor' devils."

From first to last the seaman's thoughts
are very much concerned with his anchors.
It is not so much that the anchor is a symbol

21

The Mirror of the Sea

of hope as that it is the heaviest object that
he has to handle on board his ship at sea in
the usual routine of his duties; The begin-
ning and the end of eveiry pdssage are
inarked distinctly by work about the ship's
anchors. A vessel in the Channel has her
anchors always ready, her cables shadkled
on, and the land althost always in sight;
The anchor and the Idnd are itidissolubly
cdnnected in a sailor's thoughts. Blit direct-
ly she is clear of the narrow seas, heading
out into the i?(rdrld, with nothing solid to
speak of between her and the south pole,
the anchors are got in and the cables dis-
appear from the deck. But the anchors do
not disappear. Technically speaking, they
are "secured in-board"; andj on the fore-
dastle head, lashed down to ring-bolts with
ropes atld chains, utider the straining sheets
of the head-sails, they look very idle and afe
if asleep. Thus bound, but carefully looked
after, inert and powerful, those emblems of
I hope make company for the look-out man
in the hight watches; ahd so the days glide
by, tvith a Idrig rest for those characteristi-
cally shapfed pieces of it-on, reposing forward,

22

Emblems of Hope

visible from almost every part of the ship's
deck, waiting for their work on the other
side of the world somewhere, while the ship
carries them on with a great rush and splutr
ter of foam underneath, and the sprays pf
the open sea rust their heavy limbs.

The first apprqach to Ijhe land, as yet inr
visible 'to the crpw's eyes, is announced by
the brisk order of the chief mate to the
boatswain: "We will get the anchors over
this afternoon" or ''first thing to-morrp-^
morning," as the case may be. For the
chief mate is the keeper of the ship's anchors
and thp guardian of her cable. There are
good ships and bad ships, comfortable ships
and ships where, from first day to last of the
voyage, there is no rest for a chipf mate's
body and soul. And ships are w^at men
make^jh^a; this is a pronouncement of
SEulor wisdom, and, no doubt, in the main it
is true.

However, there are ships where, as an old,
grizzled mate once told me, "nothit^g ever
seems to go right!" And, looking froip the
poop where we both stood (I had paid him a
ji^ighborly call in dock), he added: "She's
23

The Mirror of the Sea

one of them." He glanced up at my face,
which expressed a proper professional sym-
pathy, and set me right in my natural sur-
mise: "Oh no; the old man's right enough.
He never interferes. Anything that's done
in a seaman-like way is good enough for him.
And yet, somehow, nothing ever seems to go
right in this ship. I tell you what: she is
naturally urbhandy."

The "old man," of course, was his cap-
tain, who just then came on deck in a silk
hat and brown overcoat, and, with a civU
nod to us, went ashore. He was certainly
not more than thirty, and the elderly mate,
with a murmur to me of "That's my old
man," proceeded to give instances of the
natural unhandiness of the ship in a sort of
deprecatory tone, as if to say, " You mustn't
think I bear a grudge against her for
that."

The instances do not matter. The point
is that there are ships where things do go
wrong; but whatever the ship — good or bad,
lucky or tinlucky — ^it is in the forepart of
her that her chief mate feels most at home.
It is emphatically his end of the ship,
24

Emblems of Hope

though, of course, he is the executive super-
visor of the whole.' There are his anchors,
Ms head-gear, his foremast, his station for
manoeuvring when the captain is in charge.
And there, too, live the men, the ship's
hands, whom it is his duty to keep em-
ployed, fair weather or foul, for the ship's
welfare. It is the chief mate, the only figure
of the ship's afterguard, who comes bustling
forward at the cry of "All hands on deck!"
He is the satrap of that province in ,the.,auto-
cratic realm of the ship, and more personally
responsible for anything that may happen
there.

' There, too, on the approach to the land,
assisted by the boatswain and the carpenter,
he "gets the anchors over" with the men of
his own watch, whom he knows better than
the others. There he sees the cable ranged,
the windlass disconnected, the compressors
opened; and there, after giving his own last
order, "Stand clear of the cable!" he waits
attentive, in a silent ship that forges slowly
ahead towards her picked-out berth, for the
sharp shout from aft, "Let go!" Instantly
bending over, he sees the trusty iron fall

25

The Mirror of the Sea

with a heavy plunge under his eyes, which
watch and note whether it has gone clear.

For the anchor "to go clear" means to go
clear of its own chain. Your anchor rnust
drop froni the bp^ of your ship with no turn
of cable on any pf its limbs, else you would
be riding tq a foul anchor. Unless the pull
of the cable is fair on the ring, no anchor
can be trusted eyen on the best of holding
grpund. In time of stress it is bound to
dr^ig, fpr implements ai;d nien must be
treated fairly to give you the "virtue"
which is in them. The anchor is an em-
blem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse
than the mpst fallaciptjs of false hopes that
ever lured men or nations into a sense of
security. And the sense of security, even
the mpst warranted, is a bad councillor. Ijt
is the sense which, like that exaggerated feel-
ing of Tiyell-bejng oipinous of the coming pn
pf naadness, precedes the swift fall pf dis-
aster. A seaman labpring under an undue
serise pf security becpnies at pnce wprth
hardly half his salt. Therefpre, pf all my
chief pflficers, the pne I trusted mpsl? was

a man palled B . He had a red mus-

26

Emblems of Hope

tache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy
eye. He was worth all his salt.

On examining now, after many years, the
residue of the feeling which was the outcome
of the contact of our personalities, I dis-
cover, without much surprise, a certain
flavor of dislike. Upon the whole, I think
he was one of the most uncomfortable ship-
mates possible for a young commander. If
it is permissible to criticise the absent, I
should say he had a Uttle too much of the
sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in
a seaman. He had an extremely disturbing
air of being everlastingly ready (even when
seated at table at my right hand before a
plate of salt beef) to grapple with some im-
pending calamity. I must hasten to add~
that he had also the other qualification
necessary to make a trustworthy seaman —
that of an a bsolute confidence in h imself.
What was really wrong with him was that
he had these qualities in an unrestful degree.
His eternally watchful demeanor, his jerky,
nervous talk, even his, as it were, deter-
mined silences, seemed to imply — and, I be-
lieve, they did imply — that to his mind the
3* 27

The Mirror of the Sea

ship was n ever safe in my hands. Such was
the man who looked after the anchors of a
less than five - hundred - ton bark, my first
command, now gone from the face of the
earth, but sure of a tenderly remembered
existence as long as I live. No anchor could

have gone down foul under Mr. B *s

piercing eye. It was good for one to be
sure of that "when, in an open roadstead, one
^fard in the cabin the wind pipe up; but
still there were moments when I detested
Mr. B^-- — exceedingly. From the way he
used to glare/sometimes, I fancy that more
than once he paid me back with interest.
It so happened that we both loved the little
bark very much. And it was just the de-
fect of Mr. B 's inestimable qualities that

he would never persuade himself to believe
that the ship was safe in my hands. To be-
gin with, he was more than five years older
than myself at a time of Hfe when five years
really do count, I being twenty-nine and he
thirty-four; then, on our first leaving port (I
don't see why I should make a secret of the
fact that it was Bangkok), a bit of manoeu-
vring of mine among the islands of the Gulf
- 28

Emblems of Hope

of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare.
Ever since then lie' haci~ni3rsed in secret a
bitter idea of my utter recklessness . But upon
the whole, and unless the grip of a naan's hand
at parting means nothing whatever, I con-
clude that we did like each other at the end
of two years and three months well enough.
The bond between us was the ship; and
therein a ship, though she has female aw
tributes and is loved very unreasonably, i3
different from__a^ woman. That~'r ""should
have been tremendously smitten with my
first command is nothing to wonder at, but
I suppose I must admit that^ Mr. ■ B— — 's
sentiment was of a higher order. Each of
us, of course, was extremely anxious about
the good appearance of the beloved object;
and, though I was the one to glean compli-
ments ashore, B had the more intimate

pride of feeling, resembling that of a devoted
handmaiden. And that sort of faithful and
proud devotion went so far as to make him
go about flicking the dust off the varnished
teak-wood rail of the little craft with a silk
pocket-handkerchief — a present from Mrs.

B , I believe.

29

The Mirror of the Sea

That was the effect of his love for the
bark. The effect of his admirable lack of
the sense of security once went so far as to
make him remark to me: "Well, sir, you are
a lucky man!"

It was said in a tone full of significance,
but not exactly offensive, and it was, I sup-
pose, my innate tact that prevented my ask-
ing, "What on earth do you mean by that?"

Later on his meaning was illustrated more
fully on a dark night in a tight comer dur-
ing a dead on-shore gale. I had called him
Up on deck to- help me consider our ex-
tremely unpleasant situation. There was
not much time for deep thinking, and his
summing up was: "It looks pretty bad,
whichever we try; but then, sir, you always
do get out of a mess somehow."

It is difficult to disconnect the idea of
ships' anchors from the idea of the ship's
chief mate — the man who sees them go
down clear and come up sometimes foul ; be-
cause not even the most unremitting care
30

Emblems of Hope

can always prevent a ship, swinging to
winds and tide, from taking an awkward
turn of the cable round stock or fluke.
Then the business of "getting the anchor"
and securing it afterwards is unduly pro-
longed, and made a weariness to the chief
mate. He is the man who watches the
growth of the cable — a sailor's phrase which
has all the forcCj precisionfand imagery of
tecimical- language that, created by simple
men with keen eyes for the real aspect of
the things they see in their trade, achieves
the just expression seizing upon the essential,
which is the ambition of the artist in words.
Therefore the sailor will never say "cast^
anchor," and the ship-master aft will hail
his chief mate on the forecastle in impres-
sionistic phrase: "How does the cable
grow?" Because "grow" is the right word
for the long drift of a cable emerging aslant
under the strain, taut as a bow-string above
the water. And it is the voice of the keep-
er of the ship's anchors that will answer:
"Grows right ahead, sir," or "Broad on the
bow," or whatever concise and deferential
shout will fit the case.
31

The Mirror of the Sea

There is no order more noisily given or
taken up with lustier shouts on board a
homeward-bound merchant ship than the
command, "Man the windlass!" The rush
of expectant men out of the forecastle, the
snatching of hand-spikes, the tramp of feet,
the clink of the pawls, make a stirring ac-
companiment to a plaintive up-anchor song
with a roaring chorus; and this burst of
noisy activity from a whole ship's crgw
seems like a voiceftil awakening of the ship
herself, till then, in the picturesque phrase
of Dutch seamen, "lying asleep upon her
iron."

For a ship with her sails furled on her
squared yards, and reflected from truck to
water-line in the smooth gleaming sheet of a
landlocked harbor, seems, indeed, to a sea-
man's eye the most perfect picture of slum-
bering repose. The getting of your anchor
was a noisy operation on board a merchant
ship of yesterday — an inspiring, joyous
noise, as if, with the emblem of hope, the
ship's company expected to drag up out of
the depths, each man all his personal hopes
into the reach of a securing hand — the hope
32

Emblems of Hope

of home, the hope of rest, of liberty, of dis-
sipation, of hard pleasure, following the
hard endurance of many days between sky
and water. And this noisiness, this exulta-
tion at the moment of the ship's departure,
make a tremendous contrast to the silent
moments of her arrival in a foreign roa<3U*
stead — the silent moments when, stripped
of her sails, she forges ahead to her chosen
berth, the loose canvas fluttering softly in
the gear above the heads of the men stand-
ing still upon her decks, the master gazing
intently forward from the break of the poop.
Gradually she loses her way, hardly moving,
with the three figures on her forecastle wait-
ing attentively about the cat-head for the
last order of, perhaps, full ninety days at
sea: "Let go!"

This is the final word of a ship's ended
journey, the closing word of her toil and of
her achievement, (in a life whose worth is
told out in passages from port to port, the
splash of the anchor's fall and the thundei--
ous rumbling of the chain are like the closing
of a distinct period, of which she seems con-
scious'tiath'a slight deep shudder of all her
33

The Mirror of the Sea

frame. By so much is she nearer to her ap-
pointed death, for neither years nor voyages
can go on foreverT\ It is to her like the
striking of a clock, and in the pause which
follows she seems to take count of the pass-
ing time.

This is the last important order; the others
are mere routine directions. Once more the
master is heard: "Give her forty-five fathom
to the water's edge," and then he, too, is
done for a time. For days he leaves all the
harbor work to his chief mate, the keeper of
the ship's anchor and of the ship's routine.
For days his voice will not be heard raised
about the decks, with that curt, austere ac-
cent of the man in charge, till, again, when
the hatches are on, and in a silent and ex-
pectant ship, he shall speak up from aft in
commanding tones: "Man the windlass!"

The Fine Art

IHE other year, looking through
a newspaper of sound princi-
ples, but whose staff will per-
sist in "casting" anchors and
going to sea "on" a ship
(ough!), I came across an article upon the
season's yachting. And, behold! it was a
good article. To a man who had but Httle
to do with pleasure sailing (though all sail-
ing is a pleasure), and certainly nothing
whatever with racing in open waters, the
writer's strictures upon the handicapping of
yachts were just intelligible and no more.
And I do not pretend to any interest in the
•enumeration of the great races of that year.
As to the fifty-two-foot linear raters, praised
so much by the writer, I am warmed up by
his approval of their performances; but, as
far as any clear conception goes, the de-
35

The Mirror of the Sea

scriptive phrase, so precise to the compre-
hension of a yachtsman, evokes no definite
image in my mind.

The writer praises that class of pleasure-
vessels, and I am willing to indorse his
words, as any man who loves every craft
afloat would be ready to do. I am disposed
to admire and respect the fifty-two-foot
linear raters on the word of a man who
regrets in such a sympathetic and under-
standing spirit the threatened decay of
yachting seamanship.

Of course, yacht -racing is an organized
pastime,' a function of social idleness min-
istering to the vanity of certain wealthy in-
habitantTof"iEHese"isles nearly asTHuch as to
their inborn love of the sea." But the writer
of the article in question goes on tb point out,
with insight and justice, that for a great ntmi-
ber of people (twenty thousand, I think he
says) it is a means of livehhood — that it is,
in his own words, an industry. Now, the
moral side of an industry, productive or un-
productive, the redeeming and ideal aspect
of this bread-winning,, is the attainment and
preservation of the highest possible skill on
36

The Fine Art

the part of the craftsmen. Such skill, the
skill of techniquCj is more than honesty; it
is something wider, embracing honesty and
gr ace and nile"in an el6-<7ategt' aiTd clear senti-
men t, noi altoge ther utilitarian, whicn may
be called the honor ot labor, it is nla'de up
of accumulated^ tradition, kept alive by in-
dividual pride, rendered exact by profes-
sional opinion, and, like the higher arts, it
is spurred on and sustained by discriminat- i
ing praise.

This is why the attainment of proficiency,
the pushing of your skill with attention to
the most delicate shades of excellence, is a
matter of vital concern. Efficiency of a
practically flawless kind may be reached
naturally in the struggle for bread. But
there is something beyond — a higher point,
a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and
pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspira-
tion which gives to all work T;hat finish
which is almost art — which t5 art. "

"tr- I "■ III"!- ■■»

As men of scrupulous honor set up a high

standard of public conscience above the

dead-level of an honest community, so men

of that skiU which passes into art by cease-

37

The Mirror of the Sea

/

less striving raise the deid-level of correct
practice in the crafts of land and sea. The
conditions fostering the growth of that su-
preme, alive, excellence, as well in work as
in play, ought to be'preserved with a most
careful regard lest the industry or the game
should perish of an insidious and inward de-
cay. Therefore I have read with profound
regret, in that article upon the yachting sea-
son of a certain year, that the seamanship
on board racing-yachts is not now what it
used to be only a few, very few, years ago.

For that was the gist of that article,
written evidently by a man who not only
knows but understands — a thing (let me re-
mark in passing) much rarer than one 'would
expect, because the sort of understanding I
mean depends so much on love; and love,
I though in a sense it may be admitted to be
^stronger than death, is by no means so uni-
versal and so sure. In fact, love is rare —
, the love of men, of things, of ideas, the love
! of perfected skill. For love is the enemy of
haste; it takes cqunt of passing days, of men
who pass away, of a fi ne ar t matured slowly
in the course of years and doomed in a short
.•?8

The Fine Art

time to pass away, too, and be no more.
Love and regret go hand in hand in this
|World of chang es swifter than -^e^shiftiiigof
the clouHs reflected in the ^tllrror of the sea.

To penalize a yacht in proportion to the
fineness of her performance is unfair to the
craft and to her men. It is unfair to the
perfection of her form and to the skill of her
servants. For we men are, in fact, the ser-
vants of our creations. We remain in ever-
lasting bondage to the productions of our
brain and to the work of our hands. A man
is born to serve his time on this earth, and^
there is something fi ne in the se rvice being
given on other grounds than that of utility.
ThFB biida^ti of ufL ia very exacting . And,^
as "tKe writer"drthe"aHic!ewEiich started this
train of thought says with lovable warmth,
the sailing of yachts is a fina^a^

His contention is that racing, without
time allowances for anything else but ton-
nage — that is, for size — has fostered the fine
art of sailing to the pitch of perfection.
Every sort of demand is made upon the
master of a sailing-yacht, and to be penalized
in proportion to your success may be of
39

The Mirror of the Sea

advantage to the sport itself, but it has an
obviously deteriorating effect upon the sea-
manship. The fine art is being lost.

The sailing and racing of yachts has de-
veloped a class of fore-and-aft sailors, men
born and bred to the sea, fishing in winter
and yachting in stimmer; men to whom the
handling of that particular rig presents no
mystery. It is their striving for victory
that has elevated the sailing of pleasure-
craft to the dignity of a fine art in that
special sense. As I have said, I know noth-
ing of racing and but little of fore-and-aft
rig; but the advantages of such a rig are
obvious, especially for purposes of pleasure,
whether in cruising or racing. It requires
less effort in handling; the trimming of the
sail-planes to the wind can be done with
speed and acctiracy; the unbroken spread of
the sail -area is of infinite advantage; and
the greatest possible amount of canvas can
be displayed upon the least possible quan-
tity of spars. Lightness and concentrated
40

The Fine Art

power are the great qualities of fore-and-
aft rig.

A fleet of fore-and-afters at anchor has its
own slender graciousness. The setting of
their sails resembles more than anything else
the tmfolding of a bird's wings; the facility
of their evolutions is a pleasure to the eye.
They are birds of the sea, whose swimming
is like flying, and resembles more a natural
function than the handling of man-invented
appliances. The fore-and-aft rig in its sim-
plicity and the beauty of its aspect under
every angle of vision is, I believe, unap-
proachable. A schooner, yawl, or cutter in
charge of a capable man seems to handle
herself as if endowed with the power of rea-
soning and the gift of swift execution. One
laughs with sheer pleasure at a smart piece
of mariceuvring, as at a manifestation, of
a living creature's quick wit and graceful,,
precision.

Of those three varieties of fore-and-aft rig,
the cutter — ^the racing rig par excellence — is of
an appearance the most imposing, from the
fact that practically all her canvas is in one
piece. The enormous mainsail of a cutter,
41

The Mirror of the Sea

as she draws slowly past a point of land or
the end of a jetty under your admiring gaze,
invests her with an air of lofty and silent
majesty. At anchor a schooner looks bet-
ter; she has an aspect of greater efficiency
and a better balance to the eye, with her
two masts distributed over the hull with a
swaggering rake aft. The yawl rig one
comes in time to love. It is, I should think,
the easiest of all to manage.

For racing, a cutter; for a long pleasure
voyage, a schooner; for cruising in home
waters, the yawl; and the handling of them
all is indeed a fine art. It requires not only
the knowledge of the genera^ principles of
sailing, but a particular acquaintance with
the character of the craft. All vessels are
handled in the same way as far as theory
goes, just .a§ you may deal with air men on
broad and rigid pi-inciples. But if 'you
want that successTirlife which comes from
the affection and confidence of your fellows,
then with no two men, however similar they
may appear in their nature, will you deal in
the same way. There may be a rule of con-
duct; there is no rule of human fellowship.
42

/

The Fine Art

To deal with men is as fine an art as it is to deal
with ships. Both men and ships live in an un^
stable element, are subject to subtle and pow- ,
erfvd influences, and want to have their merits / ^
understood rather than their faults found outy

It is not what your ship will not do that J
you want to know to get on terms of suc-
cessful partnership with her; it is, rather,
that you ought to have a precise knowledge
of what she will do for you when called upon
to put forth what is in her by a sympathetic
touch. At first sight the difference does not
seem great in either line of dealing with the
difficult problem of limitations. But the
difference is great. The difference lies in
the spirit in which the problem is approach-
ed. After all, the art of handling ships is/
finer, perhaps, thanjthe art of handling men.

And, like all fine arts, it must be based
upon a broad, solid sincerity, which, like a
law of nature, rules an infinity of different
phenomena. Your endeavor must be single-
minded. You would talk differently to a
coal-heaver and to a professor. But is this
duplicity ? I deny it. The truth consists
in the genuineness of the feeling, in the
* 43

y

The Mirror of the Sea

genuine recognition of the two men, so
similar and so different, as your two partners
in the hazard of life. Obviously, a hximbug,
thinking only of winning his little race,
would stand a chance of profiting by his
artifices. Men, professors or coal-heavers,
are easily deceived; they even have an ex-
traordinary knack of lending themselves to
deception, a sort of curious and inexplicable
propensity to allow themselves to be led by
the nose with their eyes open. But a ship is
a creature which we have brought into the
world, as it were, nn piirpo RP. to keep u s up
to the m ark. In her handling, a ship will
not put up with a mere pretender, as, for in-
stance, the public will do with Mr. X, the
popular statesman; Mr. Y, the poptilar scien-
tist, or Mr. Z, the popular — ^what shall we
say ? — anything from a teacher of high
morality to a bagman — ^who have won their
little race. But I would like (though not
accustomed to betting) to wager a large stun
that not one of the few first-rate skippers of
racing-yachts has ever been a humbug. It
would .have been too difficult. The diffi-
culty arises from the fact that one does not
44

The Fine Art

deal with ships in a mob, but with a ship as
an individual. So we may have to do with ^
men. But in each of us there lurks some
particle of the mob spirit, of the mob tem-
perament. No matter how earnestly we
strive against each other, we remain brothers >
^ on the lowest sjde^^Qiit itxtellecLajjd in the |
tnstab^^ SLSS^ feelings. With ships it is/
not so. Much as they are to us, they are
nothing to each other. Those sensitive
creatures have no ears for our blandish-
ments. It takes something more than words
to cajole them to do our will, to cover us
with glory. Luckily, too, or else there
would have been more shoddy reputations
for first - rate seamanship. Ships have no
ears, I repeat, though, indeed, I think I have
known ships who really seemed to have had
eyes, or else I cannot understand on what
ground a certain one-thousand-ton bark of
my acquaintance on one particular occasion
refused to answer her helm, thereby saving
a frightful smash to two ships and to a very
good man's reputation. I knew her inti-
mately for two years, and in no other in-
stance either before or since have I known
45

The Mirror of the Sea

her to do that thing. The man she had
served so well (guessing, perhaps, at the
depths of his affection for her), I have
known much longer, and in bare justice to
him I must say that this confidence-shatter-
ing experience (though so fortunate) only-
augmented his trust in her. Yes, our ships
have no ears, and thus they cannot be de-
ceived. I would illustrate my idea of
fidelity as between man and ship, between
the master and his^ji^, by a statement
■nrhich, though it might appear shockingly
sophisticated, is really very simple. I would
say that a racing-yacht skipper who thought
of nothing else but the glory of winning the
race would never attain to any eminence of
reputation. The genuine masters of their
draft — I say this confidently from my ex-
perience of ships — have thought of nothing
but of doing their very best by the vessel
under their charge. To forget one's self, to
surrender all personal feeling in the service of
that fine art, is the only way for a seaman to
accomplish the faithful discharge of his trust.
■ Such is the service of a fine art and of
ships that sail the sea. And" therein I
46

The Fine Art

think I can lay my finger upon the differ-
ence between the seamen of yesterday, who
are still with us, and the seamen of to-
morrow, already entered upon the posses-
sion of their inheritance. History repeats
itself, but the special call of an art which
has passed away is never reproduced. It is
as utterly gone out of the world as the song
of a destroyed wild bird. Nothing will
awaken the same response of pleasurable
emotion or conscientious endeavor. And
the sailing of any vessel afloat is an art
whose fine form seems already receding
from us on its way to the overshadowed,
Valley of Oblivion. The taking of a mod-^
ern steamship about the world (though one
would not minimize its responsibilities) has
not the sa me quality of intimacy with
nature, which, after all, is an indispensable
co ndition to the hiiilrlin^y^ irp nt an art. It^
is less personal and a more exact calling;
less arduous, but also less gratifying in the
lack of close communion between the ^^rti^
and the medium of his art. It is, in short,
less a matter of love. Its effects are meas-
ured exactly in time and gpace as no effect
47

The Mirror of the Sea

of an art can be. It is an occupation which
a man not desperately subject to sea-sickness
can be imagined to follow with content,
without enthusiasm, with industry, without
^affection. Pimctuality is its watchword.
The incertitude which attends closely every
artistic endeavor is absent from its regulated
enterprise. It has no great moments of self-
confidence, or moments not less great of
doubt and heart - searching. It is an in-
dustry which, like other industries, has its
romance, its honor, and its rewards, its bitter
anxieties and its hours of ease. But such
sea-going has not the artistic quality of a
single-handed struggle with something much
greater than yoiirself ; it is not the laborious,
absorbing practice of an art whose ultimate
result remains on the knees of the gods. It
is not an individual, temperamental achieve-
ment, but simply the skilled use of a capt-
ured force, merely another step forward upon
the way of universal conquest.

Every passage of a ship of yesterday,
whose yards were braced round eagerly the
48

The Fine Art

very moment the pilot, with his pockets fulL
of letters, had got over the side, was like a
race — a race agaiast time, against an ideal
standard of achievement outstripping the"^
expectations of common men. Like all true
"^^ the gen eral conduct of a shi p and her
handling m parti cular cases had a tech nique
which could be discussed with delight and
pIpflgljrR hy. men who found in their work
not bread alone, but an outlet for the pecu-
liarities of their temperament. To get the
best and truest effect from the infinitely
varying moods of sky and sea, not pictori-
ally, but in the spirit of their calling, was
their vocation, one and all; and they recog-
nized this with as much sincerity, and drew
as much. inspiration from this reality, as any
man who ever put brush to canvas. The
diversity of temperaments was immense
among those masters of the fine art.

Some of them were like Royal Academi-
cians of a certain kind. They never startled
you by a touch of originality, by a fresh
audacity of inspiration. They were safe,
very safe. They went about solemnly in
the assurance of their consecrated and
49

The Mirror of the Sea

empty reputation. Names are odious, but
I remember one of them who might have
been their very president, the P.R.A. of the
sea-craft. His weather-beaten and hand-
some face, his portly presence, his shirt-
fronts and broad cuffs and gold links, his
air of bluff distinction, impressed the humble
beholders (stevedores, tally - clerks, tide-
waiters) as he walked ashore over the gang-
way of his ship lying at the Circular Quay in
Sydney. His voice was deep, hearty, and
authoritative — the voice of a very prince
among sailors. He did everything with an
air which put your attention on the alert
and raised your expectations, but the result
somehow was always on stereotyped lines,
imsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one
could lay to heart. He kept his ship in
apple-pie order, which would havelieen sea-
man-like enough but for a finicking touch in
its details.) His officers affected a superi-
ority over the rest of us, but the boredom of
their souls appeared in their manner of
dreary submission to the fads of their com-
mander. It was only his apprenticed boys
whose irrepressible spirits were not affected
SO

The Fine Art

by the solemn and respectable mediocrity of
that artist. There were four of these young-
sters: one the son of a doctor, another of a
colonel, the third of a jeweller; the name of
the foiirth was Twentyman, and this is all I
remember of his parentage. But not one of
them seemed to possess the smallest spark
of gratitude in his composition. Though
their commander was a kind man in his way,
and had made a point of introducing them
to the best people in the town in order that
they should not fall into the bad company
of boys belonging to other ships, I regret to
say that they made faces at him behind his
back, and imitated the dignified carriage of
his head without any concealment whatever.
This master of the fine art was a person-
age and nothing more; but, as I have said,
there was an infinite diversity of tempera-
ment among the masters of the fine art I
have known. Some were great impression-
ists. They impressed upon you the fear of
God and Immensity — or, in other words, thej
fear of being drowned with every circum-
stance of terrific grandetir. One may think
that the locality of your passing away by
SI

The Mirror of the Sea

means of suffocation in water does not real-
ly matter very much. I am not so sure of
that. I am, perhaps, unduly sensitive, but
I confess that the idea of being suddenly
spilled into an infuriated ocean in the midst
of darkness and uproar affected me always
with a sensation of shrinking distaste. To
be drowned in a pond, though it might be
called an ignominious fate by the ignorant,

'is yet a bright and peaceful ending in com-
parison with some other endings to one's
earthly career which I have mentally quaked
at in the intervals or even in the midst of
violent exertions.

But let that pass. Some of the masters
whose influence left a trace upon my char-
acter to this very day, combined a fierceness
of conception with a certitude of execution
upon the basis of just appreciation of means
and ends which is the highest quality of the

»rman of action. And an artist is a man of
action, whether he creaEeTaTpfe'rsona'lity, in-
yents"~afi'expeaient,6f"^ finds the issue of a

1 compficateTsiEuaEionr""'

^ There were masters, too, I have known,

whose very art consisted in avoiding every

52

The Fine Art

conceivable situation. It is needless to say
that they never did great things ia their
craft; but they were not to be. despised for
that. They were modest; they understood
their limitations. Their own masters had
not handed the sacred fire into the keeping
of their cold and skilful hands. One of
those last I remember specially, now gone to
his rest from that sea which his tempera-
ment must have made a scene of little more
than a peaceful pursuit. Once only did he
attempt a stroke of audacity, one early
morning, with a steady breeze, entering a
crowded roadstead. But he was not genuine
in this display which might have been art.
He was thinking of his own self; he hankered
after the meretricious glory of a showy per-
formance.

As, rounding a dark, wooded point,
bathed in fresh air and sunshine, we opened
to view a crowd of shipping at anchor lying
half a mile ahead of us perhaps, he called me
aft from my station on the forecastle head,
and, turning over and over his binoculars in
his brown hands, said: " Do you see that big,
heavy ship with white lower masts? I am
53

The Mirror of the Sea

going to take up a berth between her and
the shore. Now do you see to it that the
men jump smartly at the first order."

I answered "Ay, ay, sir," and verily be-
lieved that this would be a fine perform-
ance. We dashed on through the fleet in
magnificent style. There must have been
many open mouths and following eyes on
board those ships — Dutch, English, with a
sprinkling of Americans and a German or
two — ^who had all hoisted their flags at eight
o'clock as if in honor of our arrival. It
would have been a fine performance if it had
come off, but it did not. Through a touch
of self-seeking that modeift artist of solid
merit became untrue to his temperament.
It was not with him art for art's sake: it was
art for his own sake; and a dismal failure
was the penalty he paid for that greatest of
sins. It might have been even heavier, but,
as it happened, we did not run our ship
ashore, nor did we knock a large hole in the
big ship whose lower masts were painted
white. But it is a wonder that we did not
carry away the cables of both our anchors,
for, as may be imagined, I did not stand
54

The Fine Art

upon the order to "Let go!" that came to
me in a quavering, quite vinknown voice
from his trembling lips. I let them both go
with a celerity which to this day astonishes
my memory. No average merchantman's
anchors have ever been let go with such
miraculous smartness. And they both held.
I could have kissed their rough, cold iron
palms in gratitude if they had not been
buried in slimy mud under ten fathoms of
water. Ultimately they brought us up with
the jib-boom of a Dutch brig poking through
our spanker — nothing worse. And a miss is
as good as a mile.

But not in art. Afterwards the master
said to me in a shy mumble, " She wouldn't
luff up in time, somehow. What's the mat-
ter with her?" And I made no answer.

Yet the answer was clear. The ship had
found out the momentary weakness of her
man. Of all the living creattires upon land
and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be
taken in by barren pretences, that will not
put up with bad art from their masters.

Cobwebs and Gossamer

?ROM the main truck of the av-
! erage tall ship the horizon de-
' scribes a circle of many miles,
in which you can see another
I ship right down to her water-
line ; and these .very eyes which follow this
writing have counted in their time over a
hundred sail becalmed, as if within a magic
ring, not very far from the Azores — ships
more or less tall. There were hardly two of
them heading exactly the same way, as if
each had meditated breaking out of the en-
chanted circle at a different point of the
compass. But the spell of the calm is a
strong magic. The following day still saw
them scattered within sight of one another
and heading different ways; but when, at
last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple
that ran yery blue on a pale sea, they all
S6

Cobwebs and Gossamer

went in the same direction together. For
this was the homeward-bound fleet from the
far-off ends of the earth, and a Falmouth
fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was
heading the flight. One could have imag-
ined her very fair, if not divinely tall, leaving
a scent of lemons and oranges in her wake.

The next day there were very few ships in
sight from our mast-heads — seven at most,
perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hull
down, beyond the magic ring of the horizon.
The speU of the fair wind has a subtle power
to scatter a white-winged company of ships
looking all the same way, each with its white
fillet of tumbling foam imder the bow. It is ^
the calm that brings ships mysteriously to-/
gether; it is your wind that is the great*'
separator.

The taller the ship, the farther she can be
seen; and her white tallness breathed upon
by the wind first proclaims her size. The
tall masts holding aloft the white canvas,
spread out like a snare for catching the in-
visible power of the air, emerge gradually
from the water, sail after sail, yard after
yard, growing big, till, imder the towering
57

The Mirror of the Sea

structure of her machinery, you perceive the
insignificant, tiny speck of her hull.

The tall masts are the pillars supporting
the balanced planes that, motionless and
silent, catch from the air the ship's motive
power, as it were a gift from heaven vouch-
safed to the audacity of man; and it is the
ship's tall spars, stripped and shorn of their
white glory, that incline themselves before
the anger of the clouded heaven.

When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and
naked submission their tallness is brought
best home even to the mind of a seaman. The
man who has looked upon his ship going over
too far is made aware of the preposterous tall-
ness of a ship's spars. It seems impossible
but .that those gilt trucks which one had to
tilt one's head -back to see, now falling into
the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit
the very edge of the horizon. Such an ex-
perience gives you a better impression of the
loftiness of your spars than any amount of
running aloft could do. And yet in my time
the royal yards of an average profitable ship
were a good way up above her decks.

No doubt a fair amotint of climbing up
58

Cobwebs and Gossamer

iron ladders can be achieved by an active
man in a ship's engine-room, but I remem-
ber moments when even to my supple limbs
and pride of nimbleness the sailing-ship's ma-
chinery seemed to reach up to the very stars.
For machinery it is, doing its work in
perfect silence and with a motionless grace,
that seems to hide a capricious and not
always governable power, taking nothing
away from the material stores of the earth.
Not. for it the vmerritig precision of steel
moved by white steam and living by red fire
and fed with black coal. The other seems to
draw its strength from the very sotd of the
world, its formidable ally, held to obedience
by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost capt-
ured in a' snare of something even finer than
spun silk. For what is the array of the strong-
est ropes, the tallest spars, and the stoutest
canvas against the mighty breath of the infi-
nite but thistle stalks, cobwebs , and gossamer ?

Indeed, it is less than nothing, and I have
seen, when the great soul of the world turned
s 59

The Mirror of the Sea

over with a heavy sigh, a perfectly new, ex-
tra stout foresail vanish like a bit of some
airy stuff much lighter than gossamer.
Then was the time for the tall spars to
stand fast in the great uproar. The ma-
chinery must do its work even if the soul of
the world has gone mad.

The modem steamship advances upon a
still and overshadowed sea with a pulsating
tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in
her depths, as if she had an iron heart in
her iron body; with a thudding rh)rthm in
her progress and the regular beat of her pro-
peller, heard afar in the night with an
august and plodding sotind as of the march
of an inevitable future. But in a gale, the
silent machinery of a sailing-ship would
catch not only the power, but the wild and
exulting voice of the world's soul. Whether
she ran with her tall spars swinging, or
breasted it with her tall spars lying over,
there was always that wild song, deep like a
chant, for a bass to the shrill pipe of the
wind played on the sea-tops, with a punctu-
ating crash, now and then, of a breaking
wave. At times the weird effects of that
60

Cobwebs and Gossamer

invisible orchestra would get upon a man's
nerves till he wished himself deaf.

And this recollection of a personal wish,
experienced upon several oceans, where the
soul of the world has £lenty of rpom to turn
over with a mighty sigh, brings me to the
remark that in order to take a proper care
of a ship's spars it is just as well for a sea-
man to have nothing the matter with his
ears. Such is the intimacy with which a
seaman had to live with his ship of yester-
day that his senses were like her senses, that
the stress upon his body made him judge of
the strain upon the ship's masts.

I had been some time at sea before I be-
came aware of the fact that hearing plays a
perceptible part in gauging the force of the
wind. It was at night. The ship was one
of those iron wool-clippers that the Clyde
had floated out in swarms upon the world
during the seventh decade of the last cen-
ttuy. It was a fine period in ship-building,
and also, I might say, a period of over-
masting. The spars rigged up on the nar-
row htdls were indeed tall then, and the
ship of which I think, with her colored-
6i

The Mirror of the Sea

glass skylight ends, bearing the motto, "Let
Glasgow Flourish," was certainly one of the
most heavily sparred specimens. She was
built for hard driving, and unquestionably
she got all the driving she could stand.
Our captain was a man famous for the
quick passages he had been used to make in
the old Tweed, a ship famous the world over
for her speed. The Tweed had been a
wooden vessel, and he brought the tradition
of quick passages with him into the iron clip-
per. I was the jtmior in her, a third mate,
keeping watch with the chief officer; and it
was just during one of the night-watches in
a strong, freshening breeze that I overheard
two men in a sheltered nook of the main-
deck exchanging these informing remarks.
Said one :

"Should think 'twas time some of them
light sails were coming off her."

And the other, an older man, uttered
grumpily:

"No fear! not while the chief mate's on
deck. He's that deaf he can't tell how
much wind there is."

And, indeed, poor P , quite young,

62

Cobwebs and Gossamer

and a smart seaman, was very hard of hear-
ing. At the same time, he had the name of
being the very devil of a fellow for carrying
on sail on a ship. He was wonderfully
clever at concealing his deafness, and, as to
carrying on heavily, though he was a fear^
less man, I don't think that he ever meant/
to take imdue risks. I can never forget hkf
naive sort of astonishment when remon-
strated with for what appeared a most dare-
devil performance. The only person, of
course, that could remonstrate with telling
effect was our captain, himself a man of
dare-devil tradition; and really, for me, who
knew under whom I was serving, those were

impressive scenes. Captain S had a

great name for sailor-like qualities — the sort
of name that compelled my youthful ad-
miration. To this day I preserve his mem-
ory, for, indeed, it was he in a sense who
completed my training. It was often a
stormy process, but let that pass. I am
sure he meant well, and I am certain that
never, not even at the time, could I bear
him malice for his extraordinary gift of in-
cisive criticism. And to hear him make a
6i

The Mirror of the Sea

fuss about too much sail on the ship seemed
one of those incredible experiences that take
place only in one's dreams.

It generally happened in this way: Night,
clouds racing overhead, wind howling, royals
set, and the ship rushing on in the dar'k, an
immense white sheet of foam level with the

lee rail. Mr. P , in charge of the deck,

hooked on to the windward mizzen-rigging
in a state of perfect serenity; myself, the
third mate, also hooked on somewhere to
windward of the slanting poop, in a state of
the utmost preparedness to jump at the
very first hint of some sort of order, but
otherwise in a perfectly acquiescent state
of mind. Suddenly, out of the companion
would appear a tall, dark figure, bareheaded,
with a short, white beard of a perpendicular

cut, very visible in the dark — Captain S ,

disturbed in his reading down below by the
frightftd bounding and lurching of the ship.
Leaning very much against the precipitous
incline of the deck, he would take a turn or
two, perfectly silent, hang on by the com-
pass vfor a while, take another couple of
turns, and suddenly burst out:
64

Cobwebs and Gossamer

"What are you trying to do with the
ship?"

And Mr. P , who was not good at

catching what was shouted in the wind,
would say, interrogatively:

"Yes, sir?"

Then in the increasing gale of the sea
there would be a little private ship's storm
going on in which you could detect strong
language, pronouficed in a tone of passion
and exculpatory protestations uttered with
every possible inflection of injured innocence.

"By Heavens, Mr. P ! I used to carry-
on sail in my time, but — "

And the rest would be lost to me in a
stormy gust of wind.

Then, in a lull, P 's protesting inno-
cence would become audible:

"She seems to stand it very well."

And then another burst of an indignant
voice :

"Any fool can carry sail on a ship — "

And so on, and so on, the ship meanwhile

rushing on her way with a heavier list, a

noisier splutter, a more threatening hiss of

the white, almost blinding, sheet of foam to

6S

The Mirror of the Sea

leeward. For the best of it was that Cap-
tain S seemed constitutionally incapa-
ble of giving his officers a definite order to
shorten sail; and so that extraordinarily-
vague row would go on till at last it dawned
upon them both, in some particularly alarm-
ing gust, that it was time to do something.
There is nothing like the fearful inclination
of your tall spars overloaded with canvas to
bring a deaf man and an angry one to their
senses.

So sail did get shortened more or less in
time even in that ship, and her tall spars
never went overboard while I served in her.
However, all the time I was with them,

Captain S and Mr. P did not get

on very well together. If P carried on

"like the very devil" because he was too
deaf to know how much wind there was,

Captain S (who, as I have said, seemed

constitutionally incapable of ordering one of
his officers to shorten sail) resented the

necessity forced upon him by Mr. P 'g

06

Cobwebs and Gossamer

desperate goings on. It ,was in Captain
S 's tradition rather to reprove his offi-
cers for not carrying on quite enough — in his
phrase, "for not taking every ounce of ad-
vantage of a fair wind." But there was
also a psychological motive that made him
extremely difficult to deal with on board
that iron clipper. He had just come out of
the marvellous Tweed, a ship, I have heard,
heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed.
In the middle sixties she had beaten by a
day and a half the steam mail-boat from
Hong-Kong to Singapore. There was some-
thing peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the
placing of her masts — ^who knows ? Officers
of men-of-war used to come on board to
take the exact dimensions of her sail-plan.
Perhaps there had been a touch of genius or
the finger of good-fortune in the fashioning
of her lines at bow and stern. It is impos-
sible to say. She was built in the East
Indies somewhere, of teak-wood through-
out, except the deck. She had a great
.sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern. The
men who had seen her described her to me
as "nothing much to look at." But in the
67

The Mirror of the Sea

great Indian famine of the seventies that
ship, already old then, made some wonder-
ftd dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with
cargoes of rice from Rangoon to Madras.

She took the secret of her speed with her,
and, unsightly as she was, her image surely
has its glorious place in the mirror of the old
sea.

The point, however, is that Captain S ,

who used to say, frequently, "She never
made a decent passage after I left her,"
seemed to think that the secret of her speed
lay in her famous commander. No doubt
the secret of many a ship's excellence does
lie with the man on board, but it was hope-
less for Captain 8 to try to make his

new iron clipper equal the feats which made
the old Tweed a name of praise upon the lips
of English - speaking seaman. There was
something pathetic in it, as in the endeavor
of an artist in his old age to equal the master-
pieces of his youth — for the Tweed's famous

passages were Captain S 's masterpieces.

It was pathetic, and perhaps just the least
bit dangerous. At any rate, I am glad that,

what between Captain S 's yearning for

68

Cobwebs and Gossamer

old triumphs and Mr. P 's deafness, I

have seen some memorable carrying on to
make a passage. And I have carried on,
myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde
ship -builder's masterpiece as I have never
carried on in a ship before or since.

The second mate falling ill during the
passage, I was promoted to officer of the
watch, alone in charge of the deck. Thus
the immense leverage of the ship's tall
masts became a matter very near my own
heart. I suppose it was something of a
compliment for a yoving fellow to be trust-
ed, apparently without any supervision, by

such a commander as Captain S ; though,

as far as I can remember, neither the tone,
nor the manner, nor yet the drift of Captain

S 's remarks addressed to myself did

ever, by the most strained interpretation,
imply a favorable opinion of my abilities.
And he was, I must say, a most tincomfort-
able commander to get your orders from at
night. If I had the watch from eight till
midnight, he would leave the deck about
nine with the words, "Don't take any sail
off her." Then, on the point of disappear-
69

The Mirror of the Sea

ing down the companion-way, he would add,
curtly: "Don't carry anything away." I
am glad to say that I never did; one night,
however, I was caught not quite prepared
by a sudden shift of wind.

There was, of course, a good deal of noise
— running about, the shouts of the sailors,
the thrashing of the sails — enough, in fact,

to wake the dead. But S never came

on deck. When I was relieved by the chief
mate an hour afterwards, he sent for me. I
went into his state-room; he was lying on
his couch wrapped up in a rug, with a pillow
under his head.

" What was the matter with you up there
just now?" he asked.

"Wind flew round on the lee quarter, sir,"
I said.

"Couldn't you see the shift coming:?"

"Yes, sir, I thought it wasn't very far
off."

"Why didn't you have your courses haul-
ed up at once, then?" he asked, in a tone
that ought to have made my blood rtin cold.

But this was my chance, and I did not let
it slip.

Cobwebs and Gossamer

"Well, sir," I said in an apologetic tone,
" she was going eleven knots very nicely, and
I thought she would do for another half-
hour or so."

He gazed at me darkly out of his head,
lying very stiU on the white pillow for a
time.

"Ah, yes, another half -hour. That's the
way ships get dismasted."

And that was all I got in the way of a
wigging. I waited a little while, and then
went out, shutting carefully the door of the
state-room after me.

Well, I have loved, lived with, and left
the sea without ever seeing a ship's tall
fabric of sticks, cobwebs, and gossamer go
by the board. Sheer good luck, no doubt.

But as to poor P , I am sure that he

would not have got off scot-free like this
but for the god of gales, who called him
away soon from this earth, which is three
parts ocean, and therefore a fit abode for
sailors, A few years afterwards I met in an
Indian port a man who had served in the
ships of the same company. Names came
up in our talk, names of our colleagues in
71

The Mirror of the Sea

the same employ, and, naturally enough, I
asked after P Had he got a com-
mand yet? And the other man answered,
carelessly :

" No ; but he's provided for, anyhow,
A heavy sea took him off the poop in
the run between New Zealand and the
Horn."

Thus P passed away from among the

tall spars of ships that he had tried to their
utmost in many a spell of boisterous weather.
He had shown me what carrying on meant,
but he was not a man to learn discretion
from. He could not help his deafness. One
can only remember his cheery temper, his
admiration for the jokes in Punch, his little
oddities — like his strange passion for bor-
rowing looking-glasses, for instance. Each
of our cabins had its own looking-glass
screwed to the bulkhead, and what he
wanted with more of them we never could
fathom. He asked for the loan in confi-
dential tones. Why ? Mystery. We made
various surmises. No one will ever know
now. At any rate, it was a harmless eccen-
tricity, and may the god of gales, who took
72

Cobwebs and Gossamer

him away so abruptly between New Zealand
and the Horn, let his soul rest in some para-
dise of true seamen, where no amotmt of
carrying on will ever dismast a ship.

The Weight of the Burden

5HERE has been a time when a
ship's chief mate, pocket-book
in hand and pencil behind his
ear, kept one eye aloft upon his
riggers and the other down the
hatchway on the stevedores, and watched
the disposition of his ship's cargo, knowing
that even before she started he was already
doing his best to secure for her an easy and
quick passage.

The hurry of the times, the loading and'
discharging organization of the docks, the
use of hoisting machinery which works
quickly and will not wait, the cry for prompt
despatch, the very size of his ship, stand
nowadays between the modem seaman and
the thorough knowledge of his craft.

There are profitable ships and unprofit-
able ships. The profitable ship will carry a
74

The Weight of the Burden

large load through all the hazards of the
weather, and, when at rest, will stand up in
dock and shift from berth to berth without
ballast. There is a point of perfection in
a ship as a worker when she is spoken of
as being able to sail without ballast. I
have never met that sort of paragon myself,
but I have seen these paragons advertised
among ships for sale. Such excess of virtue
and good-nature on the part of a ship always
provoked my mistrust. It is open to any
man to say that his ship will sail without
ballast; and he will say it, too, with every
mark of profound conviction, especially if he
is not going to sail in her himself. The risk
of advertising her as able to sail without bal-
last is not great, since the statement does
not imply a warranty of her arriving any-
where. Moreover,|it is strictly true that most
ships will sail without ballast for some little
time before they turn turtle upon the crew.
A ship-owner loves a profitable ship; the
seaman is proud of her; a doubt of her good
looks seldom exists in his mind; but if he
can boast of her more useful qualities it is
an added satisfaction for his self-love.
6 75

The Mirror of the Sea

The loading of ships was once a matter
of skill, judgment, and knowledge. Thick
books have been written about it. Stevens
on Stowage is a portly volume with the re-
nown and weight (in its own world) of Coke
on Littleton. Stevens is an agreeable writer,
and, as is the case with men of talent, his
gifts adorn his sterling soundness. He gives
you the official teaching on the whole sub-
ject, is precise as to rules, mentions illustra-
tive events, quotes law cases where verdicts
turned upon a point of stowage. He is
never pedantic, and, for all his close ad-
herence to broad principles, he is ready to
admit that no two ships can be treated ex-
actly alike.

Stevedoring, which had been a skilled
labor, is fast becoming a labor without the
skill. The modern steamship with her many
holds is not loaded within the sailor-like
meaning of the word. She is filled up. Her
cargo is not stowed in any sense ; it is simply
dumped into her through six hatchways,
more or less, by twelve winches or so, with
clatter and hurry and racket and heat, in a
cloud of steam and a mess of coal-dust. As
76

The Weight of the Burden

long as you keep her propeller under water,
and take care, say, not to fling down barrels
of oil on top of bales of silk, qr deposit an
iron bridge-girder of five ton or so upon a
bed of coffee-bags, you have done about all
in the way of duty that the cry for prompt
despatch will allow you to do.

The sailing-ship, when I knew her in her
days of perfection, was a sensible creature.
When I say her days of perfection, I mean
perfection of build, gear, seaworthy qualities
and ease of handling, not the perfection of
speed. That quality has departed with the
change of building material. No iron ship
of yesterday ever attained the marvels of
speed which the seamanship of men famous
in their time had obtained from their wood-
en, copper-sheeted predecessors. Everything
had been done to make the iron ship per-
fect, but no wit of man had managed to de-
vise an efficient coating composition to keep
her bottom clean with the smooth cleanness
of yellow metal-sheeting. After a spell of a
77

The Mirror of the Sea

few weeks at sea, an iron ship begins to lag
as if she had grown tired too soon. It is
only her bottom that is getting foul. A
vpry little affects the speed of an iron ship
which is not driven on by a merciless pro-
peller. Qften it is impossible to tell whg,t
inconsiderate trifle puts her off \\eT stride.
A certain mysteriousness hangs around the
quality of speed as it was displayed by the
old sailing-ships commanded by a competent
seaman. In those days the speed depended
upon the seaman; therefore, apart from the
laws, rulps, and regulations for the good
preservation of his cargo, he was careful of
his loading, or what is technically called the
trim of his ship. Some ships sailed fast on
an even kpel, otjiers had to be trimmed
quite one foot by the stem, and I have
Jieard of a ship that gave her best speed on a
wind when so loaded as to float a couple of
inches by the head.

I call to mind a winter landscape in Am-
sterdam — a fiat foregrptmd of waste -land,
with here and there stacks pf timber, like
the hilts of a camp pf some very miserable
tribe; the long stretch of the Han4elskade;
78

The Weight of the Burden

ccild, stbne- faced quays, with the snow-
spfiriiikled grotitid and the hard, frazeh water
of the canal, in which were set ships one be-
hind another ivith their frosty mooring-
topes hdtiging slack and their decks idle and
deserted, because, as the master stevedore (a
gbtitle, pale person, with a few gdlden hairs
on his chin and a reddened nose) informed
me, their cargoes were frozen in up-counti^
on barges and schuyts. In the distance, be-
ydnd the waste ground, and running parallel
with the line bf ships, a line of brown; warm-
toiifed hduses seemed bowed tinder snow-
laden roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar
Peter Straat; issued in the frosty air the
tinkle of bells of the horse tram-cars^ appear-
ing and disappearing in the opening between
the buildings, like little toy carriages har-
nigssed with toy horses and played with by
Jjebple that appeared no bigger than children;
I Was, as the French sa^, biting my fists
with impatience for that cargo frozen up-
cduntry; with rage at that canal set fast, at
the wintry and deserted as^sect of all those
ships that seethed to decay in griiri depres-
sion for want of the open water. I was chief
79

The Mirror of the Sea

mate, and very much alone. Directly I had
joined I received from my owners instruc-
tions to send all the ship's apprentices away
on leave together, because in such weather
there was nothing for anybody to do, unless
to keep up a fire in the cabin stove. That
was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed,
inconceivably dirty, and weirdly toothless
Dutch ship-keeper, who could hardly speak
three words of English, but who must have
had some considerable knowledge of the
language, since he managed invariably to
interpret in the contrary sense everything
that was said to him.

Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the
ink froze on the swing-table in the cabin,
and I found it more convenient to go ashore
stumbling over the arctic waste-land and
shivering in glazed tram - cars in order to
wifite my evening letter to my owners in a
gorgeous caf6 in the centre of the town. It
was an immense place, lofty and gilt, up-
holstered in red plush, full of electric lights,
and so thoroughly warmed that even the
marble tables felt tepid to the touch. The
waiter who brought me my cup of coffee
80

The Weight of the Burden

bore, by comparison with my utter isola-
tion, the dear aspect of an intimate friend.
There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write
slowly a letter addressed to Glasgow, of
which the gist would be: There is no cargo,
and no prospect of any coming till late
spring apparently. And aU the time I sat
there the necessity of getting back to the
ship bore heavily on my already half -con-
gealed spirits — the shivering in glazed tram-
cars, the stumbling over the snow-sprinkled
waste grotind, the vision of ships frozen in a
row, appearing vaguely like corpses of black
vessels in a white world, so silent, so lifeless,
so soulless they seemed to be.

With precaution I would go up the side of
my own particular corps^, and would feel
her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under
my feet. My cold berth would swallow up
like a chilly- burial r^iche my bodily shivers
and my mental excitement. It was a cruel
winter. The very air seemed as hard and
trenchant as steel; but it would have taken
much more than this to extinguish my
sacred fire for the exercise of my craft. No
young man of twenty-four appointed chief
8i

The Mirror of the Sea

mate for the first time in his life would have
let that Dutch tenacious winter penetrate
into his heart. I think that in those days I
never forgot the fact of my elevation for five
consecutive minutes. I fancy it kept me
warm, even in my slumbers, better than the
high pile of blankets, which positively
crackled with frost as I threw them off in
the morning. And I would get up early for
no reason whatever except that I was in sole
charge. The new captain had not been ap-
pointed yet.

Almost each morning a letter from my
owners would arrive, directing me to go to
the charterers and clamor for the ship's
cargo; to threaten them with the heaviest
penalties of demurrage; to demand that this
assortment of varied merchandise, set fast
in a landscape of ice and windmills some-
where up-country, should be put on rail in-
stantly, and fed up to the ship in regular
quantities every day. After drinking some
hot coffee, like an arctic explorer setting off
on a sledge journey towards the north pole,
I would go ashore and roll shivering in a
tram-car into the very heart of the town,

83

The Weight of the Burden

past clean-faced, houses, past thousands of
brass knockers lipbn a thousand painted
doors glimmering behind rows of trees of
the paveriient species, leafless, gaunt; seem-
ingly dead forever.

That part of the expedition was easy
enough, though the horses were pairiftiUy
glistening with ibicles, and the aspect of the
tram-conductors' faces presented a repulsive
blending of crimson and purple. But as to
frightening or bullying, or even wheedling
some sort of answfer out of Mr. Htidi g, that
was another inatter altdgether. Hfe was a
big, swarthy Netherlander, with black mus-
tache and a bold glance. He always began
by shoving me into a chair before I had time
to open niy itiduth, gave me cdrdially a large
cigar, and in excellent English woiild start
to taUc everlastingly about the phenomenal
severity of 'the weather. It was inipdssible
to threaten a man who, thoiigh he possessed
the language perfectly, steemed incapable of
understanding any phrase pronotiiiced in a
tone of remonstrance or discDntfent. As to
quarrelling With him, it would have been
stupid. The weather was too bitter for
83

The Mirror of the Sea

that. His office was so warm, his fire so
bright, his sides shook so heartily with
laughter, that I experienced always a great
difficulty in making up my mind to reach
for my hat.

At last the cargo did come. At first it
came dribbling in by rail in trucks, till the
thaw set in; and then fast, in a multitude of
barges, with a great rush of unbound waters.
The gentle master stevedore had his hands
very full at last ; and the chief mate became
worried in his mind as to the proper dis-
tribution of the weight of his first cargo
in a ship he did not personally know be-
fore.

Ships do want humoring. They want
htunoring in handling; and if you mean to
handle them well, they must have been
htimored in the distribution of the weight
which you ask them to carry through the
good and evil fortune of a passage. Your
ship is a tender creature, whose idiosyn-
crasies must be attended to if you mean her
to come, with credit to herself and you,
through the rough-and-tumble of her life.

The Weight of the Burden

So seemed to think the new captain, who
arrived the day after we had finished load-
ing, on the very eve of the day of sailing. I
first beheld him on the quay, a complete
stranger to me, obviously not a Hollander,
in a black bowler and a short, drab over-
coat, ridictdously out of tone with the winter
aspect of the waste-lands, bordered by the
brown fronts of houses with their roofs drip-
ping with melting snow.

This stranger was walking up and down,
absorbed in the marked contemplation of
the ship's fore-and-aft trim; but when I saw
him squat on his heels in the slush at the
very edge of the quay to peer at the draught
of water under her counter, I said to myself,
"This is the captain." And presently I
descried his luggage coming along — a real
sailor's chest, carried by means of rope-
beckets between two men, with a couple of
leather portmanteaus and a roll of charts
sheeted in canvas piled upon the lid. The
sudden, spontaneous agility with which he
bounded aboard right off the rail afforded
me the first glimpse of his real character.
Without further preliminaries than a friend-
8S

The Mirror of the Sea

ly nod, he addressed me: "You have got her
pretty well in her fore-and-aft trim. Now
what about your weights?"

I told him I had managed to keep the
weight sufficiently well up, as I thought^
one-third of the whole being in the upper
part "above the beams," as the technical
expression has it. He whistled "Phew!"
scrutinizing me from head to fdot. A sort
of smiling vexation was visible on his ruddy
face.

"Well, we shall have a lively time of it
this passage, I bet," he sdid.

He knew. It turned oiat he had been
chief mate of her for the two preceding voy-
ages; and I was already familiar with his
handwriting in the old log-books I had been
perusing in my cabin with a nattiral curi-
osity, looking up the records of my new
ship's luck, of her behavior, of the good
times she had had, and of the troubles she
had escaped.

He was right in his prophecy. On otir
passage from Amsterdam to Samarang with
a general cargo, bf which, alas! only one-
third in weight was stowed "d,bove thfe
86

The Weight of the Burden

beams," we had a lively time of it. It was
lively, but not joyful. There was not even
a single moment of comfort in it, because no
seaman can feel comfortable in body or
mind when he has made his ship tineasy.

To travel along with a cranky ship for
ninety days or so is no doubt a nerve-frying
experience ; but in this case what was wrong
with our craft was this: that by my system
of loading she had been made much too
stable.

Neither before nor since have I felt a ship
roll so abruptly, so violently, so heavily.
Once she began, you felt that she would
never stop, and this hopeless sensation char-
acterizing the motion pf ships whose centre
of gravity is brought down too low in load-
ing made every one on board weary of keep-
ing on his feet. I remember once overhearr
ing one of the hands say: "By Heavens,
Jack! I feel as if I didn't mind how soon I
let myself go, and let thp blamed hooker
knock my brains out if she likes." The
captain used to remark, frequently: "Ah,
yes ; I dare say one - third weight above
beams 'would have been quite enough for
87

The Mirror of the Sea

most ships. But then, you see, there's no
two of them alike on the seas, and she's an
imcommonly ticklish jade to load."

Down south, running before the gales of
high latitudes, she made our life a burden
to us. There were days when nothing
would keep even on the swing-tables, when
there was no position where you could fix
yourself so as not to feel a constant strain
upon all the muscles of your body. She
rolled and rolled with an awful dislodging
jerk and that dizzily fast sweep of her masts
on every swing. It was a wonder that the
men sent aloft were not flung off the yards,
the. yards not flung off the masts, the masts
not flung overboard. The captain in his
arm-chair, holding on grimly at the head of
the table, with the soup -tureen rolling on
one side of the cabin and the steward
sprawling on the other, would observe, look-
ing at me: "That's your one-third above the
beams. The only thing that surprises me is
that the sticks have stuck to her all this
time."

Ultimately some of the minor spars did go
— nothing important: spanker - booms and
88

The Weight of the Burden

such like — because at times the frightful
impetus of her rolling would part a fourfold
tackle of new three-inch Manila-line as if it
were weaker than pack-thread.

It was only poetic justice that the chief
mate, who had made a mistake — ^perhaps a
half excusable one — about the distribution
of his ship's cargo, should pay the penalty.
A piece of one of the minor spars that did
carry away flew against the chief mate's
back, and sent him sliding on his face for
quite a considerable distance along the
main - deck. Thereupon followed various
and unpleasant consequences of a physical
order — "queer symptoms," as the captain,
who treated them, used to say; inexplicable
periods of powerlessness, sudden accesses of
mysterious pain; and the patient agreed
fully with the regretful mutters of his very
attentive captain wishing that it had been
a straightforward broken leg. Even the
Dutch doctor who took the case up in
Samarang offered no scientific explanation.
All he said, was: "Ah, friend, you are young
yet; it may be very serious for yovu" whole
life. You must leave your ship; you must
89

The Mirror of the Sea

quite silent be for three months — quite
silent."

Of course, he meant the chief mate to
keep quiet — to lay up, as a matter of fact.
His manner was impressive enough, if his
English was childishly imperfect when com-
pared with the fluency of Mr. Hudig, the
figure at the pther end of that passage, and
memorable enough in its way. In a great,
airy ward of a Far Eastern hospital, lying
on my back, I had plenty of leisure to re-
member the dreadful cold arid snow of Am-
sterdam, while looking afr the fronds of the
palm-trees tossing and rustling at the height
of the window. I could remember the
elated feeling and the soul-gripping cold of
those tram-way journeys taken into town to
put what in diplomatic language is called
pressure upon the good Hudig, with his
warm fire, his aym-chair, his big cigar, and
the never-failing suggestion in his good-
natvtrpd voice: "I suppose in the end it is
you they will appoint captain before the
ship sails?" It may have been his extreme
good -nature, the serious, imsrniling good-
natvire of a fat, swarthy man with coal-
90

The Weight of the Burden

black mustache and steady eyes; but he
rnight have been a bit of a diplonaatist, too.
His enticing suggestions I used to repel
modestly by the assurance that it was ex-
tremely unlikely, as I had not enough ex-
perience, "You know very well how to go
about business matters," he used to say,
with a sort of affected moodiness clouding
his serene, round face. I wonder whether he
ever laughed to himself after I had left the
office. I dare say he never did, because I
understand that diplomatists, in and out of
the career, take themselves and their tricks
with an exemplary seriousness.

But he had nearly persuaded me that I
was fit in every way to be trusted with a
command. There came three months of
mental worry, hard rolling, remorse, and
physical pain to drive home the lesson of in-

.J5C_' J.

The Mirror of the Sea

is a serious relation, that in which a man
stands to his ship. She has her rights as
though she could breathe and speak; and,
[indeed, there are ships that, for the right
Itnan, will do an3rthing but speak, as the say-
ing goes.

A ship is not a slave. You must make
her easy in a sea-way, you must never forget
that you owe her the full est share o f your

thoug ht,, of your sV JII, of yrtnr qplf-lnvp. If

you remember that obligation, natxurally
and without effort, as if it were an instinc-
tive feeling of your inner life, she will sail,
■^stay, run for you as long as she is able, or,
like a sea-bird going to rest upon the angry
waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that
ever made you doubt living long enough to
see another simrise.

Overdue and Missing

|FTEN I ttirn with melancholy
I eagerness to the space reserved
in the newspapers under the
'general heading of "Shipping
, Intelligence." I meet there the
names of ships I have known. Every year
some of these names disappear — the names
of old friends. Tempi pasSati !

The different divisions of that kind of
news are set down in their order, which
varies but slightly in its arrangement of
concise head-lines. And first comes " Speak-
ings " — reports of ships met and signalled at
sea, name, port, where from, where bound
for, so many days out, ending frequently with
the words "All well." Then come "Wrecks
and Casualties" — a longish array of para-
graphs, unless the weather has been fair and
clear, and friendly to ships all over the world.
93

The Mirror of the Sea

On some days there appears the heading
"Overdue" — an ominous threat of loss and
sorrow trembling yet in the balance of fate.
There is something sinister to a seaman in the
very grouping of the letters which form this
word, clear in its meaning, and seldom
threatening in vain.

Only a very few days more — appallingly
few to the hearts which had set themselves
bravely to hope against hope — three weeks,
a month later, perhaps, the name of ships
tmder the blight of the "Overdue" heading
shall appear again in the column of "Ship-
ping Intelligence," but imder the final dec-
laration of "Missing."

"The ship (or bark, or brig) so-and-so,
bound from such a port, with such and such
cargo, for such another port, having left at
such and such a date, last spoken at sea on
such a day, and never having been heard of
since, was posted to-day as missing." Such
in its strictly official eloquence is the form
of funeral orations on ships that, perhaps
wearied with a long struggle, or in some un-
gtmrded moment that may come to the
readiest of us, had let themselves be over-
94

Overdue and Missing

whelmed by a sudden blow from the en-
emy.

Who can say? Perhaps the men she car-
ried had asked her to do too much, had
stretched beyond breaking-point the endur-
ing faithfulness which seems wrought and
hammered into that assemblage of iron ribs
and plating, of wood and steel and canvas
and wire, which goes to the making of a ship
— a complete creation endowed with char-
acter, individuality, qualities and defects,
by men whose hands laimch her upon the
water, and that other men shall learn to
know with an intimacy surpassing the in-
timacy of man with man, to love with a love
nearly as great as that of man for woman,
and often as blind in its infatuated disre-
gard of defects.

There are ships which bear a bad name,
but I have yet to meet one whose crew for
the time being failed to stand up angrily for
her against every criticism. One ship which
I call to mind now had the reputation of
killing somebody every voyage «he made.
This was no calumny, and yet I remember
well, somewhere far back in the late seven-
95

The Mirror of the Sea

ties, that the crew of that ship were, if any-
thing, rather proud of her evil fame, as if
they had been an utterly corrupt lot of
desperadoes glorying in their association
with an atrocious creature. We, belonging
to other vessels moored all about the Circular
Quay in Sydney, used to shake our heads at
her with a great sense of the unblemished
virtue of our own well-loved ships.

I shall not pronounce her name. She is
"missing" now, after a sinister, but, from
the point of view of her owners, a useful
career extending over many years, and, I
should say, across every ocean of our globe.
Having killed a man for every voyage, and
perhaps rendered more misanthropic by the
infirmities that come with years upon a ship,
she had made up her mind to kill all hands
at once before leaving the scene of her ex-
ploits. A fitting end, this, to a life of use-
fulness and crime — in a last outburst of an
evil passion supremely satisfied on some
wild night, perhaps, to the applauding
clamor of wind and wave.

How did she do it? In the word "miss-
ing" there is a horrible depth of doubt and
96

Overdue and Missing

speculation. Did she go quickly from under
the men's feet, or did she resist to the end,
lettiag the sea batter her to pieces, start her
butts, wrench her frame, load her with an
increasing weight of salt-water, and, dis-
masted, tmmanageable, rolling heavily, her
boats gone, her decks swept, had she wearied
her men half to death with the tmceasing
labor at the pumps before she sank with
them like a stone ?

However, such a case must be rare. I
imagine a raft of some sort could always be
contrived; and, even if it saved no one, it
would float on and be picked up, perhaps
conveying some hint of the vanished name.
Then that ship would not be, properly
speaking, missing. She would be " lost with
all hands," and in that distinction there is a
subtle difference — less horror and a less ap-
palling darkness.

The unholy fascination of dread dwells in
the thought of the last moments of a ship
reported as "missing" in the columns of the
97

The Mirror of the Sea

Shipping Gazette. Nothing of her ever comes
to light — no grating, no life-buoy, no piece
of boat or branded oar — to give a -hint of
the place apd date of her sudden end. The
Shipping Gazette does not even call her " lost
with all hands." She remains simply "miss-
ing"; she has disappeared enigmatically into
a mystery of fate as big as the world, where
your imagination of a brother-sailor, of a
fellow-servant and lover of ships, may
range unchecked.

And yet sometimes one gets a hint of
what the last scene may be like in the life of
a ship and her crew, which resembles a
drama in its struggle against a great force
bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic
and mysterious as fate.

It was on a gray afternoon in the lull of a
three days' gale that had left the Southern
Ocean tumbling heavily upon our ship, un-
der a sky hung with rags of clouds that
seemed to have been cut and hacked by the
keen edge of a sou'west gale.

Our craft, a Clyde-built bark of one thou-
sand tons, rolled so heavUy that something
9,loft had carried away. No matter what the
9S

Overdue and Missing

damage was, but it was serious enough to
induce Rie to go aloft myself with a couple
of hands and the carpenter to see the tem-
porary repairs properly done.

Sometimes we had to drop everything and
cling with both hands to the swaying spars,
holding our breath in fear of a terribly
heavy roll. And, wallowing as if she meant
to turn over with us, the bark, her decks
f till of water, her gear flying in bights, ran
at some ten knots an hour: We had been
driven far south— much farther that way
than we had meant to go ; and suddenly, up
there in the slings of the foreyard, in the
midst of our work, I felt my shoulder
gripped with such force in the carpenter's
powerful paw that I positively yelled with
unexpected pain. The man's eyes stared
close in my face, and he shouted, "Look,
sir! look! What's this.?" pointing ahead
with his other hand.

At first I saw nothing. The sea was one
empty wilderness of black-and-white hills.
Suddenly, half concealed in the tumult of
the foaming rollers I made out awash,
something enormous, rising and falling —
99

The Mirror of the Sea

something spread out like a burst of foam,
but with a more bluish, more solid look.

It was a piece of an ice-floe melted down
to a fragment, but still big enough to sink a
ship, and floating lower than any raft, right
in our way, as if ambushed among the waves
with murderous intent. There was no time
to get down on deck. I shouted from aloft
till my head was ready to split. I was
heard aft, and we managed to clear the
simken floe which had come all the way
from the southern ice-cap to have a try at
our unsuspecting lives. Had it been an
hour later, nothing could have saved the
ship, for no eye could have made out in the
dusk that pale piece of ice swept over by
the white-crested waves.

And as we stood near the taffrail side by
side, my captain and I, looking at it, hardly
discernible already, but still quite close-to
on our quarter, he remarked in a meditative
tone:

"But for the turn of that wheel just in
time there woiild have been another case of
a 'missing' ship."

Nobody ever comes back from a "miss-

lOO

Overdue and Missing

ing" ship to tell how hard was the death of
the craft, and how sudden and overwhelm-
ing the last anguish of her men. Nobody-
can say with what thoughts, with what re-
grets, with what words on their lips they
lied. But there is something fine in the
mdden passing away of these hearts from
the extremity of struggle and stress and tre-
mendous uproar — from the vast, tmrestful
rage of the surface to the profound peace of j
the depths, sleeping untroubled since th©
beginning of ages.

But if the word "missing" brings all hope
;o an end and settles the loss of the xmder-
srr iters, the word "overdue" confirms the
"ears already born in many homes ashore,
md opens the door of speculation in the
narket of risks.

Maritime risks, be it understood. There
s a class of optimists ready to reinsure an
'overdue" ship at a heavy premium. But
lothing can insure the hearts on shore against
;he bitterness of waiting for the worst.

lOI

The Mirror of the Sea

For if a "missing" ship has never turned
up within the memory of seamen of my gen-
eration, the name of an "overdue" ship,
trembling as it were on the edge of the fatal
heading, has been known to appear as "ar-
rived."

It must blaze up, indeed, with a great
brilliance the dull, printers' ink expended on
the assemblage of the few letters that form
the ship's name to the anxious eyes scanning
the page in fear and trembling. It is like
the message of reprieve from the sentence
of sorrow suspended over many a home,
even if some of the men in her have been
the most homeless mortals that you may :
find among the wanderers of the sea.

The reinsurer, the optimist of ill-luck and
disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction.
The underwriter, who had been trying to
minimize the amount of impending loss, re-
grets his premature pessimism. The ship
has been stancher, the skies more merciful,
the seas less angry, or perhaps the men on
board of a finer temper than ,he has been
willing to take for granted.

"The ship So-and-so, botmd to such a

103

Overdue and Missing

port, and posted as 'overdue,' was reported
yesterday as having arrived safely at her
destination."

Thus run the official words of the reprieve
addressed to the hearts ashore lying under
a heavy sentence. And they come swiftly
from the other side of the earth, over wires
and cables, for your electric telegraph is
a great alleviator of anxiety. Details, of
course, shall follow. And they may unfold
a tale of narrow escape, of steady ill-luck, of
high winds and heavy weather, of ice, of in-
terminable calms or endless head -gales; a
tale of difficulties overcome, of adversity de-,
fied by a small knot of men upon the great
loneliness of the sea; a tale of resource, of
courage— of helplessness, perihaps. "" /

Of all ships disabled at sea, a steamer who
has lost her propeller is the most helpless.
And if she drifts into an unpopulated part
of the ocean she may soon become overdue.
The menace of the "overdue" and the
finality of "missing" come very quickly to
steamers whose life, fed on coals and breath-
ing the black breath of smoke into the air,
goes on in disregard of wind and wave.
103

The Mirror of the Sea

Such a one, a big steamship, too, whose
working life had been a record of faithful
keeping time from land to land, in disregard
of wiad and sea, once lost her propeller
down south, on her passage out to New
Zealand.

It was the wintry, murky time of cold
gales and heavy seas. With the snapping
of her tail-shaft her life seemed suddenly to
depart from her big body, and from a stub-
born, arrogant existence she passed all at
once into the passive state of a drifting log.
K^hip sick with her own weakness has not
fthe pathos of a ship vanquished in a battle
with the elements, wherein consists the inner
/ftrama of her life. No seaman can look
•Without compassion upon a disabled ship,
but to look at a sailing-vessel with her lofty
spars gone is to look upon a defeated but in-
domitable warrior. There is defiance in the
remaining stumps of her masts, raised up
like maimed limbs against the menacing
scowl of a stormy sky; there is high courage
in the upward sweep of her lines towards
the bow; and as soon as, on a hastily rigged
spar, a strip of canvas is shown to the wind
104

Overdue and Missing

to keep her head to sea, she faces the waves
again with an unsubdued courage.

The efficiency of a steamship consists not
so much in her courage as ia the power she
carries within herself. It beats and throbs"
like a pulsating heart within her iron ribs,
and when it stops, the steamer, whose life is
not so much a contest as the disdainful ig-
noring of the sea, sickens and dies upon the
waves. The sailing-ship, with her imthrob-
bing body, seemed to lead mysteriously a
sort of unearthly^ existence, bordering upon
the magic^oT the invisible forc^, sustained
by the mspuration ot lii'e^^^givmg and death-
dealing winds.

So that big steamer, dying by a sudden
stroke, drifted, an unwieldy corpse, away
from the track of other ships. And she
would have been posted really as "overdue,"
or maybe as "missing," had she not been
sighted in a snow-storm, vaguely, like a
strange, rolling island, by a whaler going
north from her polar cniising - ground,
los

The Mirror of the Sea

There was plenty of food on board, and I
don't know whether the nerves of her pas-
sengers were at all affected by an5rthing else
than the sense of interminable boredom or
the vague fear of that unusual situation.
Does a passenger ever feel the life of the
ship in which he is being carried like a sort
of honored bale of highly sensitive goods?
For a man who has never been a passenger
it is impossible to say. But I know that
there is no harder trial for a seaman than to
feel a dead ship under his feet. /

There is no mistaking that seiisation, so
dismal, so tormenting and so subtle, so full
of unhappiness and unrest. I could im-
agine no worse eternal punishment for evil
seamen who die unrepentant upon the
earthly sea than that their souls should be
condemned to man the ghosts of disabled
ships, drifting forever across a ghostly and
tempestuous ocean.

She must have looked ghostly enough,
that broken-down steamer, rolling in that
snow-storm — -a dark apparition in a world
of white snow-flakes to the staring eyes of
that whaler's crew. Evidently they didn't
lo6

Overdue and Missing

believe in ghosts, for on arrival into port
her captain unromantically reported having
sighted a disabled steamer in latitude some-
where about 50° S. and a longitude still
more uncertain. Other steamers came out
to look for her, and ultimately towed her
away from the cold edge of the world into a
harbor with docks and work-shops, where,
with many blows of hammers, her pulsating
heart of steel was set going again to go forth
presently in the renewed pride of its strength,
fed on fire and water, |Dreathing black
smoke into the air, pulsating, throbbing,
shouldering its arrogant way against the
great rollers in blind disdain of winds and
sea.

The track she had made when drifting
while her heart stood still within her iron
ribs looked like a tangled thread on the
white paper of the chart. It was shown to
me by a friend, her second officer. In that
surprising tangle there were words in minute
letters— "gales," "thick fog," "ice"— writ-
ten by him here and there as memoranda of
the weather. She had interminably turned
upon her tracks, she had crossed and re-
8 107

The Mirror of the Sea

crossed her hap-hazard path till it resembled
nothing so much as a puzzling maze of pen-
cilled lines without a meaning. But in that
maze there lurked all the romance of the
"overdue" and a menacing hint of "miss-
ing.

"We had three weeks of it," said my
friend. "Just think of that!"

" How do you feel about it ?" I asked.

He waved his hand as much as to say:
It's all in the day's work. But then, ab-
ruptly, as if making up his mind:

"I'll tell you. Towards the last I used to
shut myself up in my berth and cry."

"Cry?"

"Shed tears," he explained, briefly, and
rolled up the chart.

I can answer for it, he was a good man —
as good as ever stepped upon a ship's deck —
but he could not bear the feeling of a dead
ship under his feet : the sickly, disheartening
feeling which the men of some "overdue"
ships that come into harbor at last under a
jviry-rig must have felt, combated, and over-
come in the faithful discharge of their duty.

The Grip of the Land

T is difficult for a seaman to be-
lieve that his stranded ship
does not feel as unhappy at
the unnatural predicament of
[having no water vmder her
keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded.
Stranding is, indeed, the reverse of sink-
ing. The sea does not close upon the
water-logged hull with a sunny ripple, or
maybe with the angry rush of a curling
wave, erasing her name from the roll of liv-
ing ships. No. It is as if an invisible hand
had been stealthily uplifted from the bot-
tom to catch hold of her keel as it glides
through the water.

More than any other event does "strand-
ing" bring to the sailor a sense of utter and
dismal failure. There are strandings and
strandings, but I am safe to say that ninety
109

The Mirror of the Sea

per cent, of them are occasions in which a
sailor, without dishonor, may well wish him-
self dead ; and I have nb doubt that of those
who had the experience of their ship taking
the ground, ninety per cent, did actually for
five seconds or so wish themselves dead.

"Taking the ground" is the professional
expression for a ship that is stranded in
gentle circumstances. But the feeling is
more as if the ground had taken hold of her.
It is for those on her deck a surprising sen-
sation. It is as if your feet had been
caught in an imponderable snare; you feel
the balance of your body threatened, and
the steady poise of your mind is destroyed
at once. This sensation lasts only a second,
for even while you stagger something seems
to turn over in your head, bringing upper-
most the mental exclamation, full of aston-
ishment and dismay, "By Jove! she's on the
grotmd!"

And that is very terrible. After all, the
only mission of a seaman's calling is to keep
ships' keels off the ground. Thus the mo-
ment of her stranding takes away from him
every excuse for his continued existence,
no

The Grip of the Land

To keep ships afloat is his business ; it is his
trust ; it is the effective formula of the bot-
tom of all these vague impulses, dreams, and j
illusions that go to the making up of a boy's •
vocation. The grip of the land upon the
keel of your ship, even if nothing worse
comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle
and the loss of time, remains in a seaman's
memory, an indelibly fixed taste of disaster.
"Stranded," within the meaning of this
paper, stands for a more or less excusable
mistake. A ship may be "driven ashore"
by stress of weather. It is a catastrophe, a
defeat. To be "run ashore" has the little-
ness, poignancy, and bitterness of human
error.

That is why your "strandings" are for
the most part so unexpected. In fact, they
are all unexpected, except those heralded by
some short glimpse of the danger, full of agi-
tation and excitement, like an awakening
from a dream of incredible folly.

The land suddenly at night looms up right
III

The Mirror of the Sea

over your bows, or perhaps the cry of
"Broken water ahead!" is raised, and some
long mistake, some complicated edifice of
self-delusion, overconfidence, and wrong rea-
soning is brought down in a fatal shock, and
the heart-searing experience of your ship's
keel scraping and scrunching over, say, a
coral reef. It is a sound, for its size, far
more terrific to your soul than that of a
world coming violently to an end. But out
of that chaos your belief in your own pru-
dence and sagacity reasserts itself. You ask
yourself, Where on earth did I get to?
How on earth did I get there? with a con-
viction that it could not be your own act,
that there has been at work some mysteri-
ous conspiracy of accident; that the charts
are "all wrong, and if the charts are not
wrong, that land and sea have changed their
places ; that your misfortune shall forever re-
main inexplicable, since you have lived al-
ways with the sense of your trust, the last
thing on closing your eyes, the first on open-
ing them, as if your mind had kept firm
hold of your responsibility dtiring the hovirs
of sleep.

112

The Grip of the Land

You contemplate mentally your mis-
chance, till little by little your mood changes,
cold doubt steals into the very marrow of
your bones, you see the inexplicable fact in
another light. That is the time when you
ask yourself. How on earth could I have
been fool enough to get there? And you
are ready to renounce all belief in your good
sense, in your knowledge, in your fidelity,
in what you thought till then was the best
in you, giving you the daily bread of life and
the moral support of other men's confidence.

The ship is lost or not lost. Once strand-
ed, you have to do your best by her. She
may be saved by your efforts, by your re-
soiirce and fortitude bearing up against the
heavy weight of guilt and failure. And
there are justifiable strandings in fogs,
on unchartered seas, on dangerous shores,
through treacherous tides. But, saved oV
not saved, there remains with her com|
mander a distinct sense of loss, a flavor in,
the mouth of the real, abiding danger thar
lurks i n all the form s of himian existence.^
It is an acquisition, too, that feeling. A
man may be the better for it, but he will
"3

The Mirror of the Sea

not be the same. Damocles has seen the
sword suspended by a hair over his head,
and though a good man need not be made
less valuable by such a knowledge, the feast
shall not henceforth have the same flavor.

Years ago I was concerned as chief mate
in a case of stranding which was not fatal to
the ship. We went to work for ten hours
on end, laying out anchors in readiness to
heave off at high-water. While I was still
busy about the decks forward I heard the
steward at my elbow saying: "The captain
asks whether you mean to come in, sir, and
have something to eat to-day."

I went into the cuddy. My captain sat
at the head of the table like a statue. There
was a strange motionlessness of everything
in that pretty little cabin. The swing-table
which for seventy odd days had been always
on the move, if ever so little, hung quite still
above the soup-tureen. Nothing could have
altered the rich color of my commander's
complexion, laid on generously by wind and
sea; but between the two tufts of fair hair
above his ears, his skull, generally suffused
with the hue of blood, shone dead white,
114

The Grip of the Land

like a dome of ivory. And he looked
strangely untidy. I perceived he had not
shaved himself that day; and yet the wildest
motion of the ship in the most stormy lati-
tudes we had passed through, never made
him miss one single morning ever since we
left the Channel. The fact must be that a
commander cannot possibly shave himself
when his ship is aground. I have com-
manded ships myself, but I don't know; I
have never tried to shave in my life.

He did not offer to help me or himself till
I had coughed markedly several times. I
talked to him professionally in a cheery
tone, and ended with the confident asser-
tion;

"We shall get her off by midnight, sir."

He smiled faintly without looking up, and
muttered as if to himself;

"Yes, yes; the captain put the ship ashore
and we got her off."

Then, raising his head, he attacked grum-
pily the steward, a laiiky, anxious youth with
a long, pale face and two big front teeth.

"What makes this soup so bitter? I am
surprised the mate can swallow the beastly
IIS

The Mirror of the Sea

stuff. I'm sure the cook's ladled some salt-
water into it by mistake."

The charge was so outrageous that the
steward, for all answer, only dropped his eye-
lids bashfully.

There was nothing the matter with the
soup. I had a second helping. My heart
was warm with hours of hard work at the
head of a willing crew. I was elated with
having handled heavy anchors, cables, boats,
without the slightest hitch; pleased with
having laid out scientifically bower, stream,
and kedge exactly where I believed they
woidd do most good. On that occasion the
bitter taste of a stranding was not for my
mouth. That experience came later, and it
was only then that I understood the loneli-
ness of the man in charge.

It's the captain who puts the ship ashore;
it's we who get her off.

The Character of the Foe

?T seems to me that no man bom
and truthful to himself could
declare that he ever saw the
sea looking young as the earth
looks young in spring. But
some of us, regarding the ocean with under-
standing and affection, have seen it looking
old, as if the immemorial ages had been
stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of
ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes
the sea look old.

From a distance of years, looking at the
remembered aspects of the storms lived
through, it is that impression which disen-
gages itself clearly from the great body of
impressions left by many years of intimate
contact.

If you would know the age of the earth,
look upon the sea in a storm. The grayness
117

The Mirror of the Sea

of the whole immense surface, the wind fur-
rows upon the faces of the waves, the great
masses of foam, tossed about and waving
like matted white locks, give to the sea in a
gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless,
dull, without gleams, as though it had been
created before light itself.

Looking back after much love and much
trouble, the instinct of primitive man, who
seeks to personify the forces of Nature for
his affection and for his fear, is awakened
again in the breast of one civilized beyond
that stage even in his infancy. One seems
to have known gales as enemies, and even as
enemies one embraces them in that affection-
ate regret which clings to the past.

Gales have their personalities, and, after
all, perhaps it is not strange ; for, when all is
said and done, they are adversaries whose
wiles you must defeat, whose violence you
must resist, and yet with whom you must
live in the intimacies of nights and days.

Here speaks the man of masts and sails,

to whom the sea is not a navigable element,

but an intimate companion. The length of

passages, the growing sense of solitude, the

ii8

The Character of the Foe

close dependence upon the very forces that,
friendly to-day, without changing their nat-
ure, by the mere putting forth of their
might, become dangerous to-morrow, make
for that sense of fellowship which modern
seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope
to know. And, besides, your modern ship,
which is a steamship, makes her passages on
other principles than yielding to the weather
and humoring the sea. She receives smash-
ing blows, but she advances ; it is a slogging
fight, and not a scientific campaign. The
machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam
have stepped in between the man and the
sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so
much make lise of the sea as exploit a high-
way. The modern ship is not the sport of
the waves. Let us say that each of her
voyages is a triumphant progress ; and yet it
is a question whether it is not a more subtle
and more human triumph to be the sport of
the waves and yet survive, achieving yourf
end.

In his own time a man is always very
modem. Whether the seamen of three hun-
dred years hence will have the faculty of
119

The Mirror of the Sea

sympathy it is impossible to say. An in-
corrigible mankind hardens its heart in the
progress of its own perf ectability. How will
they feel on seeing the illustrations to the
sea novels of our day, or of our yesterday?
It is impossible to guess. But the seaman
of the last generation, brought into sym-
pathy with the caravels of ancient time by
his sailing-ship, their lineal descendant, can-
not look upon those lumbering forms navi-
gating the naive seas of ancient wood-cuts
without a feeling of surprise, of affectionate
derision, envy, and admiration. For those
things, whose unmanageableness, even when
represented on paper, makes one gasp with a
sort of amused horror, were manned by men
who are his direct professional ancestors.

No; the seamen of three hundred years
hence will probably be neither touched nor
moved to derision, affection, or admiration.
They will glance at the photogravures of our
nearly defunct sailing-ships with a cold, in-
quisitive, and indifferent eye. Our ships of
yesterday will stand to their ships as no
lineal ancestors, but as mere predecessors
whose course wUl have been run and the

I20

The Character of the Foe

race extinct. Whatever craft he handles at
sea, the seaman of the future shall be, not
our descendant, but only our successor.

And so much depends upon the craft
which, made by man, is one with man, that
the sea shall wear for him another aspect.
I remember once seeing the commander —
officially the master, by courtesy the cap-
tain — of a fine iron ship of the old wool fleet
shaking his head at a very pretty brigantine.
She was bound the other way. She was a
taut, trim, neat little craft, extremely well
kept; and on that serene evening when we
passed her close she looked the embodiment
of coquettish comfort on the sea. It was
somewhere near the Cape — The Cape being,
of course, the Cape of Good Hope, the Cape
of Storms of its Portuguese discoverer. And
whether it is that the word "storm" should
not be pronounced upon the sea where the
storms dwell thickly, or because men are shy
of confessing their good hopes, it has become
the nameless cape — ^the Cape tout court. The

121

The Mirror of the Sea

other great cape of the world, strangely
enough, is seldom if ever called a cape. We
say, "a voyage round the Horn"; "we
rounded the Horn"; "we got a frightful
battering off the Horn"; but rarely "Cape
Horn," and, indeed, with some reason, for
Cape Horn is as much an island as a cape.
The third stormy cape of the world, which
is the Leeuwin, receives generally its full
> name, as if to console its second-rate dig-
nity. These are the capes that look upon
the gales.

The little brigantine, then, had doubled
the Cape. Perhaps she was coming from
Port Elizabeth, from East London^ who
knows ? It was many years ago, but I re-
member well the captain of the wool clipper
nodding at her with the words, " Fancy hav-
ing to go about the sea in a thing like that!"

He was a man brought up in big, deep-
water ships, and the size of the craft under
his feet was a part of his conception of the
sea. His own ship was certainly big as
ships went then. He may have thought of
the size of his cabin, or — unconsciously^ per-
haps — have conjured up a vision of a vessel

122

The Character of the Foe

so small tossing among the great seas. I
didn't inquire, and to a young second mate
the captain* of the little, pretty brigantine,
sitting astride a camp-stool with his chin
resting on his hands that were crossed upon
the rail, might have appeared a minor king
among men. We passed her within ear-shot,
without a hail, reading each other's name
with the naked eye.

Some years later, the second mate, the re-
cipient of that almost involuntary mutter,
could have told his captain that a man
brought up in big ships may yet take a pe-
culiar delight in what we should both then
have called a small craft. Probably the
captain of the big ship would not have un-
derstood very well. His answer would have
been a grufif, "Give me size," as I heard an-
other man reply to a remark praising the
handiness of a small vessel. It was not a
love of the grandiose or the prestige attached
to the command of great tonnage, for he
continued, with an air of disgust and con-
tempt, "Why, you get flung out of your
bunk as likely as not in any sort of heavy
weather."

9 123

The Mirror of the Sea

I don't know. I remember a few nights
in my lifetime, and in a big ship, too (as big
as they made them then), when one did not
get flung out of one's bed simply because one
never even attempted to get in; one had
been made too weary, too hopeless, to try.
The expedient of turning your bedding out
on to a damp floor and lying on it there was
no eg,rthly good, since you could not keep
your place or get a second's rest in that or
any other position. But of the delight of
seeing a small craft run bravely among the
great seas there can be no question to him
whose soul does not dwell ashore. Thus I
well remember a three days' run got out of
a little bark of iowr hundred tons some-
where between the islands of St. Paul and
Amsterdam and Cape Otway on the Austra-
lian coast. It was a hard, long gale, gray
clouds and green sea, heavy weather un-
doubtedly, but stiU what a sailor would call
manageable. Under two lower topsails and
a reefed foresail the bark seemed to race
with a long, steady sea that did not becalm
her in the troughs. The solemn thundering
combers caught her up from astern, passed
124

The Character of the Foe

her with a fierce boiling up of foam level
with the bulwarks, swept on ahead with a
swish and a roar: and the little vessel, dip-
ping her jib-boom into the tumbling froth,
would go on running in a smooth, glassy hol-
low, a deep valley between two ridges of the
sea, hiding the horizon ahead and astern.
There was such fascination in her pluck,
nimbleness, the continual exhibition of un-
failing sea -worthiness,, in the semblance of
courage and endurance, that I could not
give up the delight of watching her run
through the three unforgettable days of
that gale which my mate also delighted to
extol as "a famous shove."

And this is one of those gales whose
memory in after years returns, welcome in
dignified austerity, as you remember with
pleasure the noble features of a stranger
with whom you have crossed swords once
in knightly encounter and are never to see
again. In this way gales have their physi-
ognomy. You remember them by your
own feelings, and no two gales stamp them-
selves in the same way upon your emotions.
Some cling to you in woe-begone misery;

125

The Mirror of the Sea

others come back fiercely and weirdly, like
ghouls bent upon sucking your strength
away; others, again, have a catastrophic
splendor; some are unvenerated recollec-
tions, as of spiteful wild - cats clawing at
your agonized vitals; others are severe, like
a visitation; and one or two rise up draped
and mysterious, with an aspect of ominous
menace. In each of them there is a char-
acteristic point at which the whole feeling
seems contained in one single moment.
Thus there is a certain four o'clock in the
morning in the confused roar of a black-and-
white world when coming on deck to take
charge of my watch I received the instan-
taneous impression that the ship could not
live for another hour in such a raging sea.

I wonder what became of the men who
silently (you couldn't hear yourself speak)
must have shared that conviction with me.
To be left to write about it is not, perhaps,
the most enviable fate ; but the point is that
this impression restimes in its intensity the
whole recollection of days and days of des-
perately dangerous weather. We were then,
for reasons which it is not worth while to
126

The Character of the Foe

specify, in the close neighborhood of Ker-
guelen Land ; and now, when I open an atlas
and look at the tiny dots on the map of the
Southern Ocean, I see, as if engraved upon
the paper, the enraged physiognomy of that
gale.

Another, strangely, recalls a silent man.
And yet it was not din that was wanting ; in
fact, it was terrific. That one was a gale
that came upon the ship swiftly, like a
pampero, which last is a very sudden wind
indeed. Before we knew very well what
was coming all the sails we had set had
burst; the furled ones were blowing loose,
ropes flying, sea hissing — it hissed tremen-
dously — ^wind howling, and the ship lying
on her side, so that half of the crew were
swimming and the other half clawing des-
perately at whatever came to hand, accord-
ing to the side of the deck each man had
been caught on by the catastrophe, either to
leeward or to windward. The shouting I
need not mention — it was the merest drop
in an ocean of noise — and yet the character
of the gale seems contained in the recollec-
tion of one small, not particularly impres-
127

The Mirror of the Sea

sive, sallow man without a cap and with a
very still face. Captain Jones — let us call
him Jones — had been caught unawares.
Two orders he had given at the first sign of
an utterly unforeseen onset; after that the
magnitude of his mistake seemed to have
overwhelmed him. We were doing what
was needed and feasible. The ship behaved
well. Of course, it was some time before we
could pause in our fierce and laborious ex-
ertions; but all through the work, the ex-
citement, the uproar, and some dismay, we
were aware of this silent little man at the
break of the poop, perfectly motionless,
soundless, and often hidden from us by the
drift of sprays.

When we officers clambered at last upon
the poop, he seemed to come out of that
numbed composure, and shouted to us
down wind: "Try the pumps." Afterwards
he disappeared; As to the ship, I need not
say that, although she was presently swal-
lowed up in one of the blackest nights I can
remember) she did not disappear. In truth,
I don't fancy that there had ever been much
danger of that, but certainly the experience
128

The Character of the Foe

was noisy and particularly distracting-— and
yet it is the memory of a very quiet silence
that siirvives.

For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of
mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man
who, in a chance phrase, interprets the ele-
mental passion of his enemy. Thus there is
another gale in my memory, a thing of end-
less, deep, htunming roar, moonlight, and a
spoken sentence.

It was off that other cape which is always
deprived of its title as the Cape of Good
Hope is robbed of its name. It was off the
Horn. For a true expression of dishevelled
wildness there is nothing like a gale in the
bright moonlight of a high latitud-e.

The ship, brought-to and bowing to enor-
mous; flashing seas, glistened wet from deck
to trucks; her one set sail stood out a coal-
black shape upon the gloomy blueness of the
air. I was a youngster then, and suffering
from weariness, cold, and imperfect oil-skins
which let water in at every seam. I craved
129

The Mirror of the Sea

human companionship, and, coming off the
poop, took my place by the side of the boat-
swain (a man whom I did not like) in a
comparatively dry spot where at worst we
had water only up to otir knees. Above our
heads the explosive booming gusts of wind
passed continuously, justifying the sailor's
saying, "It blows great guns." And just
from that need of human companionship,
being very close to the man, I said, or
rather shouted:

"Blows very hard, boatswain."

His answer was :

"Ay, and if it blows only a little harder
things will begin to go. I don't mind as
long as everything holds, but when things
begin to go it's bad."

The note of dread in the shouting voice,
the practical truth of these words, heard
years ago from a man I did not like, have
stamped its peculiar character on that gale.

A look in the eyes of a shipmate, a low
murmur in the most sheltered spot where
the watch on duty are huddled together, a
meaning moan from one to the other with a
glance at the windward sky, a sigh of weari-
130

The Character of the Foe

ness, a gesture of disgust passing into the
keeping of the great wind, become part and
parcel of the gale. The olive hue of hurri-
cane clouds presents an aspect peculiarly
appalling. The inky, ragged wrack, flying
before a nor'west wind, makes you dizzy
with its headlong speed that depicts the
rush of the invisible air. A hard sou'wester
startles you with its close horizon and its
low, gray sky, as if the world were a dttngeon
wherein there is no rest for body or soul.
And there are black-squalls, white-squalls,
thunder-squalls, and unexpected gusts that
come without a single sign in the sky; and
of each kind no one »of' them resembles an-
other.

There is infinite variety in the gales of
wind at sea, and except for the peculiar,
terrible, and mysterious moaning that may
be heard sometimes passing through the
roar of a hurricane — except for that imfor-
gettable sound, as if the soul of the universe
had been goaded into a mournftol groan — it
is, after all, the human voice that stamps
the mark of human conscioxisness upon the
character of a gale.

131

Rulers of East and West

^HERE is no part of the world
of coasts, continents, oceans,
seas, straits, capes, and islands
i which is not iinder the sway of
a reigning wind, the sovereign
of its typical weather. The wind rules the
aspects of the sky and the action of the sea.
But no wind rules unchallenged his realm of
land and water. As with the kingdoms of
the earth, there are regions more turbulent
than others. In the middle belt of the earth
the Trade Winds reign supreme, undisputed,
like monarchs of long -settled kingdoms,
whose traditional power, checking all undue
ambitions, is not so much an exercise of
personal might as the working of long-estab-
lished institutions. The inter-tropical king-
doms of the Trade Winds are favorable to
the ordinary life of a merchantman. The
132

Rulers of East and West

trumpet-call of strife is seldom borne on
their wings to the watchful ears of men on
the decks of ships. The regions ruled by
the northeast and southeast Trade Winds
are serene. In a southern - going ship,
bound out for a long voyage, the passage
through their dominions is characterized by
a relaxation of strain and vigilance on the
part of the seamen. Those citizens of the
ocean feel sheltered under the segis of an tm-
contested law, of an undisputed dynasty.
There, indeed, if • anywhere on earth, the
weather may be trusted.

Yet not too implicitly. Even in the con-
stitutional realm of Trade Winds, north and
south of the equator, ships are overtaken
by strange disturbances. Still, the easterly
winds, and, generally speaking, the easterly
weather all the world over, is characterized
by regularity and persistence.

As a ruler, the East Wind has a remark-
able stability ; as an invader of the high lati-
tudes lying under the tumultuous sway of
his great brother, the Wind of the West, he is
extremely difficult to dislodge, by the reason
of his cold craftiness and profound duplicity.
^33

The Mirror of the Sea

The narrow seas around these isles, where
British admirals keep watch and ward upon
the marches of the Atlantic Ocean, are sub-
ject to the turbulent sway of the West
Wind. Call it northwest or southwest, it is
all one — a different phase of the same char-
acter, a changed expression on the same
face. In the orientation of the winds that
rule the seas, the north and south directions
are of no importance. There are no North
and South Winds of any account upon this
earth. The North and South Winds are but
small princes in the dynasties that make
peace and war upon the sea. They never
assert themselves upon a vast stage. They
depend upon local causes — the configuration
of coasts, the shapes of straits, the accidents
of bold promontories round which they play
their little part. In the polity of winds, as
among the tribes of the earth, the real
struggle lies between East and West.

The West Wind reigns over the seas sur-
rounding the coasts of these kingdoms; and
134

Rulers of East and West

from the gateways of the channels, from
promontories as if from watch-towers, from
estuaries of rivers as if from postern-gates,
from passageways, inlets, straits, firths, the
garrison of the isle and the crews of the ships
going and returning look to the westward to
judge by the varied splendors of his sunset
mantle the mood of that arbitrary ruler.
The end of the day is the time to gaze at
the kingly face of the Westerly Weather,^
who is the arbiter of ships' destinies. Be-
nignant and splendid, or splendid and sin-
ister, the western sky reflects the hidden
purposes of the royal mind. Clothed in a
mantle of dazzling gold or draped in rags of
black clouds like a beggar, the might of the
Westerly Wind sits enthroned upon the
western horizon with the whole North At-
lantic as a footstool for his feet and the first
twinkling stars making a diadem for his
brow. Then the seamen, attentive courtiers
of the weather, think of regulating the con-
duct of their ships by the mood of the
master. The West Wind is too great a '
king to be a dissembler: he is no calculator
plotting deep schemes in a sombre heart ; he
^35

The Mirror of the Sea

is too strong for small artifices ; there is pas-
sion in all his moods, even in the soft mood
of his serene days, in the grace of his blue
sky whose immense and unfathomable ten-
derness reflected in the mirror of the sea
embraces, possesses, lulls to sleep the ships
with white sails. He is all things to all
oceans; he is like a poet seated upon
a throne — magnificentj simple, barbarous,
pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable,
unfathomable — but, when you understand
him, always the same. Some of his sunsets
are like pageants devised for the delight of
the multitude, when all the gems of the
royal treasure-house are displayed above
the sea. Others are like the opening of his
royal confidence, tinged with thoughts of
sadness and compassion in a melancholy
splendor meditating upon the short-lived
peace of the sea. And I have seen him put
the pent-up anger of his heart into the aspect
of the inaccessible sun, and cause it to glare
fiercely like the eye of an implacable auto-
crat out of a pale and frightened sky.

He is the war-lord who sends his bat-
talions of Atlantic rollers to the assault of
136

Rulers of East and West

our shores. The compelling voice of the
West Wind musters up to his service all the
might of the sea. At the bidding of the
West Wind there arises a great commotion
in the sky above these islands, and a great
rush of waters falls upon bur shores. The
sky of the westerly weather is full of flying,
clouds, of great big white clouds coming
thicker and thicker till they seem to stand
welded into a solid canopy, upon whose
gray face the lower wrack of the gale, thin,
black, and angry looking, flies past with ver-
tiginous speed. Denser and denser grows
this dome of vapors, descending lower and
lower upon the sea, narrowing the horizon
around the ship. And the characteristic
aspect of westerly weather, the thick, gray,
smoky and sinister tone sets in, circum-
scribing the view of the men, drenching
their bodies, oppressing their souls, taking
their breath away with booming gusts, deaf-
ening, blinding, driving, rushing them on-
ward in a swaying ship towards our coasts
lost in mists and rain.

The caprice of the winds, like the wilful-
ness of men, is fraught with the disastrous
137

The Mirror of the Sea

consequences of self-indulgence. Long an-
ger, the sense of his uncontrolled power,
spoils the frank and generous nature of the
West Wind. It is as if his heart were cor-
rupted by a malevolent and brooding ran-
cotir. He devastates his own kingdom in
the wantonness of his force. Southwest is
the quarter of the heavens where he pre-
sents his darkened brow. He breathes his
rage in terrific squalls, and overwhelms his
realm with an inexhaustible welter of clouds.
He strews the seeds of anxiety upon the
decks of scudding ships, makes the foam-
stripped oceg,n look old, and sprinkles with
gray hairs the heads of ship-masters in the
homeward-bound ships running for the Chan-
nel. The Westerly Wind asserting his sway
from the southwest quarter is often like a
monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild
imprecations the most faithful of his court-
iers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.

The southwesterly weather is the thick
weather par excellence. It is not the thick-
ness of the fog; it is rather a contraction of
the horizon, a mysterious veiling of the
shores with clouds that seem to make a low-
138

Rulers of East and West

vaulted dungeon around the running ship.
It is not blindness; it is a shortening of the
sight. The West Wind does not say to the
seaman, "You shall be blind"; it restricts
merely the range of his vision and raises the
dread of land within his breast. It makes
of him a man robbed of half his force, of
half his efficiency. Many times in my life,
standing in long sea-boots and streaming oil-
skins at the elbow of my commander on the
poop of a homeward-bound ship making for
the Channel, and gazing ahead into the gray
and tormented waste, I have heard a weary
sigh shape itself into a studiously casual
comment :

"Can't see very far in this weather."

And have made answer in the same low,
perfunctory tone:

"No, sir."

It would be merely the instinctive voicing
of an ever-present thought associated closely
with the consciousness of the land some-
where ahead and of the great speed of the
ship. Fair wind, fair wind! Who would
dare to grumble at a fair wind? It was a
favor of the Western King, who rules mas-
10 139

The Mirror of the Sea

terfuUy the North Atlantic from the latitude
of the Azores to the latitude of Cape Fare-
well. A famous shove this to end a good
passage with; and yet, somehow, one could
not muster upon one's lips the smile of
a courtier's gratitude. This favor was dis-
pensed to you from under an overbearing
scowl, which is the true expression of the
great autocrat when he has made up his
mind to give a battering to some ships and
to hunt certain others home in one breath
of cruelty and benevolence, equally dis-
tracting.

"No, sir. Can't see very far."

Thus would the mate's voice repeat the
thought of the master, both gazing ahead,
while under their feet the ship rushes at
some twelve knots in the direction of the lee
shore ; and only a couple of miles in front of
her swinging and dripping jib-boom, carried
naked with an upward slant like a spear, a
gray horizon closes the view with a multi-
tude of waves surging upward violently as
if to strike at the stooping clouds.

Awful and threatening scowls darken the
face of the West Wind in his clouded, south-
140

Rulers of East and West

west mood ; and from the King's throne-hall
in the western board stronger gusts reach
you, like the fierce shouts of raving fury to
which only the gloomy grandeur of the
scene imparts a saving dignity. A shower
pelts the deck and the sails of the ship as if
flung with a scream by an angry hand; and
when the night closes in, the night of a
southwesterly gale, it seems more hopeless
than the shade of Hades. The southwesterly
mood of the great West Wind is a lightless
mood, without sun, moon, or stars, with no
gleam of light but the phosphorescent flashes
of the great sheets of foam that, boiling up
on each side of the ship, fling bluish gleams
upon her dark and narrow hull, rolling as
she runs, chased by enormous seas, dis-
tracted in the tumult.

There are some bad nights in the king-
dom of the West Wind for homeward-
bound ships making for the Channel; and
the days of wrath dawn upon them colorless
and vague like the timid turning up of in-
visible lights upon the scene of a tyranni-
cal and passionate outbreak, awful in the
monotony of its method and the increasing
141

The Mirror of the Sea

strength of its violence. It is the same
wind, the same clouds, the same wUdly
racing seas, the same thick horizon around
the ship. Only the wind is stronger, the
clouds seem denser and more overwhelm-
ing, the waves appear to have grown bigger
and more threatening during the night-
The hours, whose minutes are marked by
the crash of the breaking seas, slip by with
the screaming, pelting squalls overtaking
the ship as she runs on and on with darkened
canvas, with streaming spars and dripping
ropes. The downpours thicken. Preceding
each shower a mysterious gloom, like the
passage of a shadow above the firmament of
gray clouds, filters down upon the ship.
Now and then the rain pours upon your
head in streams as if from spouts. It seems
as if your ship were going to be drowned be-
fore she sank, as if all atmosphere had
turned to water. You gasp, you splutter,
you are blinded and deafened, you are sub-
merged, obliterated, dissolved, annihilated,
streaming all over as if your limbs, too, had
turned to water. And every nerve on the
alert you watch for the clearing-up mood of
142

Rulers of East and West

the Western King, that shall come with aj-
shift of wind as likely as not to whip all the /
three masts out o£ your ship in the twinkling/
of an eye.

Heralded by the increasing fierceness of
the squalls, sometimes by a faint flash of
lightning like the signal of a lighted torch
waved far away behind the clouds, the shift
of wind comes at last, the crucial moment of
the change from the brooding and veiled
violence of the southwest gale to the spark-
ling, flashing, cutting, clear-eyed anger of
the King's northwesterly mood. You be-
hold another phase of his passion, a fury
bejewelled with stars, mayhap bearing the
crescent of the moon on its brow, shaking
the last vestiges of its torn cloud-mantle in
inky-black squalls, with bail and sleet de-
scending like showers of crystals and pearls,
bounding oflE the spars, drumming on the
sails, pattering on the oil-skin coats, whiten-
ing the decks of homeward-bound ships.
Faint, ruddy flashes of lightning flicker in
143

The Mirror of the Sea

the starlight upon her mast-heads. A chilly
blast hums in the taut rigging, causing the
ship to tremble to her very keel, and the
soaked men on her decks to shiver in their
wet clothes to the very marrow of their
bones. Before one squall has flown over to
sink in the eastern board, the edge of an-
other peeps up already above the western
horizon, racing up swift, shapeless, like a
black bag full of frozen water ready to burst
over your devoted head. The temper of
the ruler of the ocean has changed. Each
gust of the clouded mood that seemed
warmed by the heat of a heart flaming with
anger has its counterpart in the chilly blasts
that seem blown from a breast turned to ice
with a sudden revulsion of feeling. Instead
of blinding your eyes and crushing your soul
with a terrible apparatus of cloud and mists
and seas and rain, the King of the West
turns his power to contemptuous pelting of
your back with icicles, to making yoiir
weary eyes water as if in grief, and your
worn-out carcass quake pitifully. But each
mood of the great autocrat has its own
greatness, and^eacK*"is ^^iSTto bear. Only
144

Rulers of East and West

the northwest phase of that mighty display
is not demoralizing to the same extent, be-
cause between the hail and sleet squalls of a
northwesterly gale one can see a long way
ahead.

To see! to see! — this is the craving of the
sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity. To
have his path made clear for him is the as-
piration of every htinianjDeingjn__our be-
cloudeC and temp est uous ,existence. I have
heard a reserved, silent man, with no nerves
to speak of, aftet three days of hard running
in thick southwesterly weather, burst out,
passionately: "I wish to God we could get
sight of something!"

We had just gone down below for a mo-
ment to commune in a battened-down cabin,
with a large white chart lying limp and
damp upon a cold and clammy table under
the light of a smoky lamp. Sprawling over
that seaman's silent and trusted adviser,
with one elbow upon the coast of Africa and
the other planted in the neighborhood of
Cape Hatteras (it was a general track-chart
of the North Atlantic), my skipper lifted his
rugged, hairy face, and glared at me in a
I4S

The Mirror of the Sea

half - exasperated, half - appealing way. We
had seen no sun, moon, or stars for some-
thing like seven days. By the effect of the
West Wind's wrath the celestial bodies had
gone into hiding for a week or more, and the
last three days had seen the force of a south-
west gale grow from fresh, through strong,
to heavy, as the entries in my log-book
could testify. Then we separated, he to go
on deck again, in obedience to that mysteri-
ous call that seems to sound forever in a
ship-master's ears, I to stagger into my
cabin with some vague notion of putting
down the words "Very heavy weather" in
a log-book not quite written up to date.
But I gave it up, and crawled into my bunk
instead, boots and hat on, all standing (it
did not matter ; everything was soaking wet,
a heavy sea having burst the poop skylights
the night before), to remain in a night-
marish state between waking and sleeping
for a couple of hours of so-called rest.

The southwesterly mood of the West
Wind is an enemy of sleep, and even of a
recumbent position, in the responsible offi-
cers of a ship. After two hours of futile,
146

Rulers of East and West

light-headed, inconsequent thinking upon
all things under heaven in that dark, dank,
wet and devastated cabin, I arose suddenly
and staggered up on deck. The autocrat of
the North Atlantic was still oppressing his
kingdom and its outlying dependencies, even
as far as the Bay of Biscay, in the dismal
secrecy of thick, very thick, weather. The
force of the wind, though we were running
before it at the rate of some ten knots an
hour, was so great that it drove me with a
steady push to the front of the poop, where
my commander was holding on.

"What do you think of it?" he addressed
me in an interrogative yell.

What I really thought was that we both
had had just about enough of it. The man-
ner in which the great West Wind chooses
at times to administer his possessions does
not commend itself to a person of peaceful
and law-abiding disposition, inclined to
draw distinctions between right and wrong
in the face of every force, whose standard,
naturally, is that of might alone. But, of
course, I said nothing. For a man caught,
as it were, between his skipper and the
147

The Mirror of the Sea

great West Wind silence is the safest sort of
diplomacy. Moreover, I knew my skipper.
He did not want to know what I thought.
Ship-masters hanging on a breath before the
thrones of the winds ruling the seas have
their psychology, whose workings are as im-
portant to the ship and those on board of
her as the changing moods of the weather.
The man, as a matter of fact, under no cir-
cumstances, ever cared a brass farthing for
what I or anybody else in his ship thought.
He had had just about enough of it, I
guessed, and what he was at really was a
process of fishing for a suggestion. It was
the pride of his life that he had never wasted
a chance, no matter how boisterous, threat-
ening, and dangerous, of a fair wind. Like
men racing blindfold for a gap in a hedge,
we were finishing a splendidly quick passage
from the antipodes, with a tremendous rush
for the Channel in as thick a weather as any
I can remember, but his psychology did not
permit him to bring the ship to with a fair
wind blowing — at least not on his own in-
itiative. And yet he felt that very soon in-
deed something would have to be done. He
148

Rulers of East and West

wanted the suggestion to come from me, so
that later on, when the trouble was over, he
could argue this point with his own uncom-
promising spirit, laying the blame upon my
shoulders. I must render him the justice
that this sort of pride was his only weakness.

But he got no suggestion from me. I un-
derstood his psychology. Besides, I had
my own stock of weaknesses at the time (it
is a different one now), and among them
was the conceit of being remarkably well up
in the psychology of the Westerly Weather.
I believed — not to mince matters — that I
had a genius for reading the mind of the
great ruler of high latitudes. I fancied I
could discern already the coming of a change
in his royal mood. And all I said was :

"The weather shall clear up with the shift
of wind."

"Anybody knows that much," he snapped
at me, at the highest pitch of his voice.

"I mean before dark," I cried.

This was all the opening he. ever got from
me. The eagerness with which he seized
upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety
he had been laboring under.
149

The Mirror of the Sea

"Very well," he shouted, with an affecta-
tion of impatience, as if giving way to long
entreaties. ' ' All right. If we don't get a shift
by then we'll take that foresail off her and
put her head under the wing for the night."

I was struck by the picturesque character
of the phrase as applied to a ship brought-to
in order to ride out a gale with wave after
wave passing under her breast. I could see
her resting in the tumult of the elements like
a sea-bird sleeping in wild weather upon the
raging waters with its head tucked under its
wing. In imaginative force, in true feeling,
this is one of the most expressive sentences
I have ever heard on human lips. But as
to taking the foresail off that ship before we
put her head under her wing, I had my
grave doubts. They were justified. That
long - enduring piece of canvas was confis-
cated by the arbitrary decree of the West
Wind, to whom belong the lives of men and
the contrivances of their hands within the
limits of his kingdom. With the sound of a
faint explosion it vanished into the thick
weather bodily, leaving behind of its stout
substance not so much as one solitary strip
ISO

Rulers of East and West

big enough to be picked into a handful of
lint for, say, a wounded elephant. Torn out
of its bolt-ropes, it faded like a whiflE of
smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered
and torn by the shift of wind. For the shift
of wind had come. The unveiled, low sun
glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a
confused and tremendous sea dashing itself
upon a coast. We recognized the headland,
and looked at each other in the silence of
dumb wonder. Without knowing it in the
least, we had run up alongside the Isle of
Wight, and that tower, tinged a faint even-
ing red in the salt wind-haze, was the light-
house on St. Catherine's Point.

My skipper recovered first from his as-
tonishment. His bulging eyes sank back
gradually into their orbits. His psychology,
taking it all round, was really very credit-
able for an average sailor. He had been
spared the humiliation of laying his ship to
with a fair wind; and at once that man, of
an open and truthful nature, spoke up in
perfect good faith, rubbing together his
brown, hairy hands — the hands of a master
craftsman upon the sea:

The Mirror of the Sea

"Humph! that's just about where I reck-
oned we had got to."

The transparency and ingenuousness, in
a way, of that delusion, the airy tone, the
hint of already growing pride, were perfectly
delicious. But, in truth, this was one of the
greatest surprises ever sprung by the clear-
ing up mood of the West Wind upon one of
the most accomplished of his courtiers.

The winds of North and South are, as I
have said, but small princes among the
powers of the sea. They have no territory
of their own; they are not reigning winds
anywhere. Yet it is from their houses that
the reigning dynasties which have shared
between them the waters of the earth are
sprung. All the weather of the world is
based upon the contest of the polar and
equatorial strains of that tyrannbus race.
The West Wind is the greatest king. The
East rules between the tropics. They have
shared each ocean between them. Each has
his genius of supreme rule. The King of the
152

Rulers of East and West

West never intrudes upon the recognized-
dominion of his kingly brother. He is a
barbarian, of a northern type. Violent
without craftiness and furious without mal-
ice, one may imagine him seated masterfully,
with a double-edged sword on his knees,
upon the painted and gilt clouds of the sun-
set, bowing his shock head of golden locks,
a flaming beard over his breast, imposing,
colossal, mighty limbed, with a thundering
voice, distended cheeks, and fierce blue eyes,
urging the speed of his gales. The other,
the East King, the king of blood-red sun-
rises, I represent to myself as a spare South-
erner with clear-cut features, black-browed
and dark-eyed, gray-robed, upright in sun-
shine, resting a smooth-shaven cheek in the
palm of his hand, irhpenetrable, secret, full
of wiles, fine drawn, keen — ^meditating ag-
gressions.

The West Wind keeps faith with his
brother, the King of the Easterly Weather.
"What we have divided we have divided,"
he seems to say in his gruff voice, this ruler
without guile, who hurls as if in sport enor-
mous masses of cloud across the sky, and
IS3

The Mirror of the Sea

flings the great waves of the Atlantic clear
across from the shores of the New World
upon the hoary headlands of Old Europe,
which harbors more kings and rulers upon
its seamed and furrowed body than all the
oceans of the world together. "What we
have divided we have divided; and if no
rest and peace in this world have fallen to
my share, leave me alone. Let me play at
quoits with cyclonic gales, flinging the disks
of spinning cloud and whirling air from one
end of my dismal kingdom to the other:
over the Great Banks, along the edges of
pack-ice — ^this one with true aim right into
the bight of the Bay of Biscay, that other
upon the fiords of Norway, across the North
Sea where the fishermen of many nations
look watchfully into my angry eye. This is
the time of kingly sport."

And the royal master of high latitudes
sighs mightily, with the sinking sun upon
his breast and the double-edged sword upon
his knees, as if wearied by the inntimerable
centuries of a strenuous rule and saddened
by the unchangeable aspect of the ocean
under his feet — by the endless vista of future
154

Rulers of East and West

d,gfes #llere the work of sdwing the wind sLnd
reaping the whirlwind shall go on and On till
his realm of living waters becomes a frozen
and motionless ocean. But the other, crafty
dhd unmoved, nutsing his shaven chin be-
tween the thtuhb and forefinger of his sliin
aild treacherous hand, thinks deep within
his heart full of gttile: "Aha! our brother of
the West has fallen into the mood of kingly-
melancholy. He is tired of playing with cir-
cular gales, and blowing great guns, and un-
rolling thick stireamers of fog in childish
sport at the cost of his own poor; miserable
subjects. Their fate is most pitiful. Let
US make a foray upon the dominions of that
noisy barbarian, a great raid from Finisterre
to Hatteras, catching his fishermen un-
awares, baffling the fleets that trust to his
power, and shootirig sly arrows into the
liters of men who court his good grabes.
He is, iiideed, a worthless fellow." And
fOfth^th, while the West Wind meditates
tlpon the vanity of his irresistible might, the
thing is done, and the Easterly Weather sets
ill upon the North Atlantic,
i The prevailing weather of the North At-

The Mirror of the Sea

lantic is typical of the way in which the
West Wind rules his realm on which the sun
never sets. North Atlantic is the heart of a
great empire. It is the part of the West
Wind's dominions most thickly populated
with generations of fine ships and hardy
men. Heroic deeds and adventurous ex-
ploits have been performed there, within the
very stronghold of his sway. The best
sailors in the world have been born and bred
under the shadow of his sceptre, learning to
manage their ships with skill and audacity
before the steps of his stormy throne.
Reckless adventurers, toiling fishermen, ad-
mirals as wise and brave as the world has
ever known, have waited upon the signs of
his westerly sky. Fleets of victorious ships
have hung upon his breath. He has tossed
in his hand squadrons of war-scarred three-
deckers, and shredded out in mere sport the
bunting of flags hallowed in the traditions
of honor and glory. He is a good friend
and a dangerous enemy, without mercy to
unseaworthy ships and faint-hearted sea-
men. In his kingly way he has taken but
little account of lives sacrificed to his im-
156

Rulers of East and West

pulsive policy; he is a king with a double-
edged sword bared in his right hand. The
East Wind, an interloper in the dominions
of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced
tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his
back for a treacherous stab.

In his forays into the North Atlantic the
East Wind behaves like a subtle and cruel
adventiirer without a notion of honor or fair
play. Veiling his clear-cut, lean face in a
thin layer of a hard, high cloud, I have seen
him, like a wizened robber sheik of the sea,
hold up large caravans of ships to the num-
ber of three hundred or more at the very
gates of the English Channel. And the
worst of it was that there was no ransom
that we could pay to satisfy his avidity ; for
whatever evil is wrought by the raiding
East Wind, it is done only to spite his
kingly brother of the West. We gazed
helplessly at the systematic, cold, gray-
eyed obstinacy of the Easterly Weather,
while short rations became the order of the
day, and the pinch of hunger under the
breast-bone grew familiar to every sailor in
that held-up fleet. Every day added to our
157

The Mirror of the Sea

numbers. In knots and groups and strag-
gling parties we flung to and fro before the
closed gate. 'And meantime the eastward-
bound ships passed, running through our
htimiliated ranks under all the canvas they
could show. It is my idea that the Easterly
Wind helps the ships away from home in
the wicked hope that they shall all come to
an untimely end and be heard of no more.
For six weeks did the robber sheik hold the
trade route of the earth, while our liege lord,
thfe West Wind, slept profoundly like a tired
Titan, or else remained lost in a mood of
idle sadness known only to frank natures.
All was still to the westward; we looked in
vain towards his stronghold: the King
slumbered on so deeply that he let his for-
aging brother steal the very mantle of gold-
lined purple clouds from his bowed shoulders.
What had become of the dazzling hoard of
royal jewels exhibited at every close of day?
Gone, disappeared, extinguished, carried off
without leaving a single gold band or the
flash of a singlie sunbeam in the evening
sky! Day after day, through a cold streak
of hfeavens as bare and poor as the insidfe of
is8

Rulers pf East and Wpst

a rifled safe, a rayless and despoiled sun
would slink shamefacedly, without pomp or
show, to hide in haste under the waters.
And still the King slept on, or mourned the
vanity of his might and his power, while the
thin-lipped intruder put the impress pf his
cold and implacable spirit upon the sky anci
sea. With every daybreak the rising sun
had to wade through a crimson stream, I14-
minous and sinister, like the spilled blood of
celestial bodies murdered during the night.

In this particular instance the mean in-
terloper held the ro^d for some six weeks
on end, establishing his particular adminis-
.tratiye methods over the best part pf the
North Atlantic. It looked as if the Easterly
Weather had come to stay forever, or, at
least, till we had all starved to death in the
hel4-up fleet— starved within sight, as it
were, of plenty, within touch, alniost, of the
bountiful heart of the Empire. There we
were, dotting with our white, dry sails the
hard blueness of the deep sea. There we
were, a growing company of ships, each
with her burden of grain, of timber, of wool,
pf hides, and even of oranges, for we had
159

The Mirror of the Sea

one or two belated fruit schooners in com-
pany. There we were, in that memorable
spring of a certain year in the late seventies,
dodging to and fro, bafifled on every tack,
and with our stores running down to sweep-
ings of bread-lockers and scrapings of sugar-
casks. It was just like the East Wind's
nature to inflict starvation upon the bodies
of unoffending sailors, while he corrupted
their simple souls by an exasperation lead-
ing to outbursts of profanity as lurid as his
blood-red sunrises. They were followed by
gray days under the cover of high, motion-
less clouds that looked as if carved in a slab
of ash -colored marble. And each mean,
starved sunset left us calling with impreca-
tions upon the West Wind even in its most
veiled, misty mood to wake up and give us
our liberty, if only to rush on and dash the
heads of our ships against the very walls of
our unapproachable home.

In the atmosphere of the Easterly Weather,
as pellucid as a piece of crystal and refract-
i6o

Rulers of East and West

ing like a prism, we could see the appalling
numbers of our helpless company, even to
those who in more normal conditions would
have remained invisible, sails down under
the horizon. It is the malicious pleasure of
the East Wind to augment the power of
your eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you ■
should see better the perfect humiliation,^
the hopeless character of your captivity.!
Easterly Weather is generally clear, and that
is all that can be said for it — almost super-
naturally clear when it likes; but whatever
its mood, there is something uncanny in its
nature. Its duplicity is such that it will de-
ceive a scientific instrument. No barometer
will give warning of an Easterly Gale, were it
ever so wet. It would be an unjust and un-
grateful thing to say that a barometer is a
stupid contrivance. It is simply that the
wiles of the East Wind are too much for its
fundamental honesty. After years and years
of /experience the most trusty instrument of
the sort that ever went to sea screwed on to
a ship's cabin bulkhead will, almost invari-
ably, be induced to rise by the diabolic in-
genuity of the Easterly Weather, just at the
i6i

The Mirror of the Sea

rtioment when the Easterly Weather, dis-
carding its methods of hard, dry, impassive
cruelty, contemplates drowning what is left
of your spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold
and horrid rain. The sleet-and-hail squalls
following the lightning at the end of a
Westerly Gale are cold and benumbing and
stinging and cruel enough. But the dry.
Easterly Weather, when it turns to wet,
seems to rain poisoned showers upon your
head. It is a sort of steady, persistent,
overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour,
which makes your heart sick, and opens it
to dismal forebodings. And the stormy
mpqd of the Easterly Weather looms black
•Upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing
blackness. The West Wind hangs heavy
gray curtains of mist and spray before your
gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the nar-
row seas, when he has mustered his courage
and cruelty to the point of a gale, puts your
eyqs out, puts them out completely, makes
you feel blind for life upon a lee-shore. It
is the wind, also, that brings snow.

Out of his black and merciless heart
he flings a white, blinding sheet uppn the;
162

Rulers of East and West

ships of the sea. He has more manners of
villany and no more conscience than an
Italian prince of the seventeenth century.
His weapon is a dagger carried under a
black cloak when he goes out on his unlaw-
ful enterprises. The mere hint of his ap-
proach fills with dread every craft that
swims the sea, from fishing-smacks to four-
masted ships that recognize the sway of thp
West Wind. Even in his most accommq-
dating mood he inspires a dread of treachery.
I have heard upward of ten scoj-e qf wind-
lasses spring like qne into clanking Hfe in
the dead of night, filling the Downs with a
panic-struck sound of anchors being torn
hurriedly out of the ground at the first
breath of his approach. Fortunately, his
heart often fails him: he does nqt always
blow home upon our exposed coast; he h^s
not the fearless temper of his Westerly
brother.

The natures of those two winds that share
the dominions of the great oceans are funda-
mentally different. It is strange that the
winds which men are prone to style capricious
remain true to their character in all the yari-
163

The Mirror of the Sea

ous regions of the earth. To us here [in
England], for instance, the East Wind comes
across a great continent, sweeping over the
greatest body of solid land upon this earth.
For the Australian east coast the East Wind
is the wind of the ocean, coming across the
greatest body of water upon the globe; and
yet here and there its characteristics remain
the same with a strange consistency in every-
thing that is vile and base. The members
of the West Wind's dynasty are modified in
a way by the regions they rule, as a Hohen-
zoUem, without ceasing to be himself, be-
comes a Roumanian by virtue of his throne,
or a Saxe - Coburg learns to put the dress
of Bulgarian phrases upon his particular
thoughts, whatever they are.

The autocratic sway of the West Wind,
whether forty north or forty south of the
equator, is characterized by an open, gen-
erous, frank, barbarous recklessness. For
he is a great autocrat, and to be a great
autocrat you must be a great barbarian. I
have been too much moulded to his sway to
nurse now any idea of rebellion in my heart.
Moreover, what is a rebellion within the four
164

Rulers of East and West

walls of a room against the tempestuous rule
of the West Wind ? I remain faithful to the
memory of the mighty king with a double-
edged sword in one hand and in the other
holding out rewards of great daily runs and
famously quick passages to those of his
courtiers who know how to wait watchfully
for every sign of his secret mood. As we
deep-water men always reckoned, he made
one year in three fairly lively for anybody
having business upon the Atlantic or down
there along the "forties" of the Southern
Ocean. You had to take the bitter with the
sweet; and it cannot be denied he played
carelessly with our lives and fortunes. But,
then, he was always a great king, fit to rule
over the great waters where, strictly speak-
ing, a man would have no business whatever
but for his audacity.

The audacious should not complain. A
mere trader ought not to grumble at the
tolls levied by a mighty king. His mighti-
ness was sometimes very overwhelming ; but
even when you had to defy him openly, as
on the banks of the Agulhas homeward-
bound from the East Indies, or on the out-
165

The Mirror of the Sjea

Tv^rd passage rpund the Horn, he struck at
you fairly his stinging bloiys (full in the
face, too), and it was your business not to
get top much staggered. And, after all, if
you showed anjrthing of a countenance, the
good-natured barbarian would let you fight
your way past the very steps of his throne.
It was only now and then that the sword
descended and a head fell; but if you fell
you were sure of impressive obsequies and
of a roomy, generous grave.

Such is the king to whom Viking chief-
tains bowed their ieads, and whom the
modern and palatial steamship defies with
impunity seven times a week. And yet it is
but defiance, not victory. The magnificent
barbarian sits enthroned in a mantle of gold-
lined clouds looking from on high on great
ships gliding like mechanical toys upon his
sea, and on men who, armed with fire and
iron, no longer need to watch anxiously fpr
the slightest sign of his royal mood. He is
disregarded; but he has kept all his strength,
all his splendor, and a grpat part of h^s
power. Time itself, that shakes all the
thrones, is on the side of that king. Tl^e
i66

Rulers of East and West

sword in his hand remains as sharp as ever
upon both its edges ; and he may well go on
playing his royal game of quoits with hurri-
canes, tossing them over from the continent
of republics to the continent of kingdoms, in
the assurance that both the new republics
and the old kingdoms, the heat of fire and
the strength of iron, with the untold genera-
tions of dudacious irien, shall crumble to
dust at the steps of his throne, and pass
away and be forgotten before his own rule
comes to an end.

The Faithful River

^HE estuaries of rivers appeal
strongly to an adventurous im-
agination. This appeal is not
always a charm, for there are
estuaries of a particularly dis-
piriting ugliness : lowlands, mud - flats, or
perhaps barren sand hills without beauty
of form or amenity of aspect, covered with
a shabby and scanty vegetation conveying
the impression of poverty and uselessness.
Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a re-
pulsive mask. A river whose estuary re-
sembles a breach in a sand rampart may
flow through a most fertile country. But
all the estuaries of great rivers have their
fascination, the attractiveness of an open
portal. Water is friendly to man. The
ocean, a part of nature farthest removed in
the unchangeableness and majesty of its
i68

The Faithful River

might from the spirit of mankind, has ever
been a friend to the enterprising nations of
the earth. And of all the elements this is
the one to which men have always been/
prone to trust themselves, as if its im-
mensity held a reward as vast as itself.

From the offing the open estuary promises
every possible fruition to adventurous hopes.
That road open to enterprise and courage
invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts
towards the fulfilment of great expectations.
The commander of the first Roman gaUey
must have looked with an intense absorp-
tion upon the estuary of the Thames as
he turned the beaked prow of his ship to
the westward under the brow of the North
Foreland. The estuary of the Thames is
not beautiful; it has no noble features, no
romantic grandeur of aspect, no smiling
geniality; but it is wide open, spacious, in-
viting, hospitable at the first glance, with a
strange air of mysteriousness which lingers
about it to this very day. The navigation
of his craft must have engrossed all the
Roman's attention in the calm of a sum-
mer's day (he would choose his weather),
169

The Mirror of the Sea

when the single row of long sweeps (the gal-
ley would be a light one, riot a trireme)
could fall in easy cadence upon a sheet of
water like plate-glass, reflecting faithfully
the classic form of his vessel and the contotlr
of the lonely shores close on his left hand.
I assume he followed the land and passed
through what is at present kndwn as Mar-
gate Roads, groping his careful way along
the hidden sand-banks, whose every tail and
spit has its beacon or buoy nowadays. He
must have bfeen anxious, though no doubt
he had collected beforehand on the shores
of the Gauls a store of information from
the talk of traders, adventurers, fishermen,
slave-dealers, piratfes^-all sorts of unofficial
men connected with the sea in a more or lesS
reputable way. He would have heard of
channels and sand-banks, of natural features
of the land useful for sea-ma,rks, of villages
and tribes arid modes of barter and precau-
tions to take: with the instructive tales
about native chiefs dyed more or less blue,
whose character for greediness, ferocity, or
amiability must have been expounded to
him with that capacity for vivid language
170

The Faithful Riyer

^hich pepms joined naturally to the ^hpl-dir
i^ess p£ moral character smii fecjdessnpss of
4ispQsitipn. With that sprt of spiced food
provided fpr his anxious thPUght, watchful
for strange men, gtrange I3e8,stg, sl^raiig^
turns of the tide, he would make the best of
his way up, a military seg,man with a short
^pord on thigh and a trpnze helmet Qji his
head, the pioueer post-paptaiu of an imr
perial fleet. Was the trihe inhabiting the
Isle pf Thauet of a ferpeipus di^posjtipi^, I
wpnder, and ready to fail with stpne-studded
clubs and wooden lances hardened in the
fire, upon the backs of unwary mariners ?
Among the great commerciq,! streams of

these islands, the Thames is the only one, I
think, open to romantic feeling, from the
fact that the sight of human lahPf and the
sounds pf hum3,n industry dp not Pomfs
down its shores tP thp YPry sea, destroying
the suggestion of mysterious vastness caused
by the configuration of the shore. The
broad inlet of the shallow North Sea passes
gradually into the ppntracted shape of the
riyer; t|ut fpr a long time the feeling of the
Qpen W9,ter remains with the ship steering

The Mirror of the Sea

to the westward through one of the lighted
and buoyed passageways of the Thames,
such as Queen's Channel, Prince's Channel,
Four-Fathom Channel; or else coming down
the Swin from the north. The rush of the
yellow flood-tide hurries her up as if into
the unknown between the two fading lines
of the coast. There are no features to this
land, no conspicuous, far-famed landmarks
for the eye; there is nothing so far down to
tell you of the greatest agglomeration of
mankind on earth dwelling no more than
twenty miles away, where the sun sets in a
blaze of color flaming on a gold background,
and the dark, low shores trend towards each
other. And in the great silence the deep,
faint booming of the big guns being tested
at Shoeburyness hangs about the Nore — a
historical spot in the keeping of one of Eng-
land's appointed guardians.

The Nore sand remains covered at low-
water, and never seen by human eye; but
the Nore is a name to conjure with visions
172

The Faithful River

of historical events, of battles, of fleets, of
mutinies, of watch and ward kept upon the
great, throbbing heart of the state. This
ideal point of the estuary, this centre of
memories, is marked upon the steely gray
expanse of the waters by a light-ship paint-
ed red, that, from a couple of miles off, looks
like a cheap and bizarre little toy. I re-
member how, on coming up the river for the
first time, I was surprised at th? smallness
of that vivid object — a tiny, warm speck" of
crimson lost in an immensity of gray tones.
I was startled, as if of necessity the princi-
pal beacon in the waterway of the greatest
town on earth should have presented impos-
ing proportions. And, behold! the brown
sprit-sail of a barge hid it entirely from my
view.

Coming in from the eastward, the bright
coloring of the light-ship marking the part of
the river committed to the charge of an ad-
miral (the commander-in-chief at the Nore)
accentuates the dreariness and the great
breadth of the Thames estuary. But soon
the course of the ship opens the entrance of
the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in
173

The Mirror of the S^a

line, an4 the \Qiig, wpq4en jefty of Pprt Vieir
taria, with its few low buildings lijce the b&r
ginning of a hasty settlenient upon a wild
and ijne^plpfeji shore. The famous Thanies
tiarges sit in brown clusters upqn th^ watef
with S-n effpct of birds floating ttpQW S' pOIid;
On the inapfising e^jpansg of the great estuary
the trafifie pf the pprt where so much pf the
world's work an4 the world's ^jhinking ii
being done beconies insignifieant, scattered,
streanaing away in thin lines pf ships stringr
ing themse|vps out into the eaptprn quarter
through the various nayigable chawieJs of
which the Nore light-ship niarks the diver-
gence. The coasting traffic inpHnes tP th^
nprth ; the deep-water ships steer east with a,
southern inclination, pn thrpugh the Downs,
to the most remote ends of the world. J;|
th(S wi^iening of the shores slnlfing low in
the gray, snapky distances tjie greatness qf
the sea receives the mercantile fleet of goqd
ships that London sends out WPPn the turn
qf every tidfe, They follow one another, gp-
ing very close by the Essei? shore, yke t^g
beads of a rosary told by business-like ship-;
owners for the greater profit of th§ wor|4

;74

The Faithful Rivei-

they slipi oiie by dne intb th6 open: whilfe in
the ofHng the inward-botiild ships come Up
singly dnd in btinches from linddr the sea-
•horizon dlosing the mouth of the river be-
tween Orfordriess and North Forelands Thgy
dll converge lipdrt the Norfe, the warm fepefck
t)f red upbn the tones of drab and gray, with
the distant shores hmning together tow-
ards the west, low and flat, like the sides of
atl enOnhous canal. The sea -reach of the
Thames is straight} and, once Sheertiess is
left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited,
except for thd cliister of houses -virhich is
Sotithend, or h^re and there a lonely wodden
jetty Whet-e p^troleuin shi|)s difetharge their
dangerous cargoes, and the! oil-storage tEtnks,
low and round with slightly domed roofs,
peep bver the edge of the foreshorej as it
were d, villdge of Central African huts iifai-
tated in iron. Bordered by the black arid
shitting mud-fiats, the level tnarsh extends
for ttilles. Away ih the far background the
land rises, closirig the view with a eontinii-
ous wooded slope, fonnirig ih the distance
an interminable rampart overgrown with
bushes.

175

The Mirror of the Sea

Then, on the slight turn of the Lower
Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys
come distinctly into view, tall and slender
above the squat ranges of cement works in
Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at
the top against the great blaze of a magnifi-
cent sunset, they give an industrial character
to the scene, speak of work, manufactures,
and trade, as palm-groves on the coral
strands of distant islands speak of the lux-
uriant grace, beauty, and vigor of tropical
nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd
upon the shore with an effect of confusion as
if they had tumbled down hap-hazard from
the top of the hill at the back. The flatness
of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of
steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the
various piers. A conspicuous church-spire,
the first seen distinctly coming from the sea,
has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine
form above the chaotic disorder of men's
houses. But on the other side, on the flat
Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edi-
fice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows
and a slate roof more inaccessible than an
Alpine slope, towers over the bend in mon-
176

The Faithful River

Strous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building
for miles around, a thing like a hotel, like a
mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these
fields out of a street in West Kensington.
Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier
defined with stone blocks and wooden piles,
a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw
and crossed by a yard like a knitting-
needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon,
watches over a set of heavy dock-gates.
Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep
kbove the ranges of corrugated iron roofs.
This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the
most recent of all London docks, the nearest
to the sea.

Between .the crowded houses of Graves-
end and the monstrous red-brick pile on the
Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to
the grasp of the river. That hint of loneli-
ness, that soul of the sea which had accom-
panied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach,
abandons her at the turn of the first bend
above. The salt, acrid flavor is gone out of
the air, together with a sense of unlimited
space opening free beyond the threshold of
sand-banks below the Nore. The waters of
177

The Miri-ot of the Sea

the sea rush dri past GraVesendj tumbling
the big mboring-bubys laid klong the face of
the tdWtl; bilt thd sea-ffeeddni stops short
there, surrendering the salt tide to the need§,
the artiflces> the tdntrivances df toiling men,
Wharvfefe, landitig-places, dock-gates, water-
side stair^j follow one another contiguously
tight up to London Bridge, sLnd the hum of
meti's -Work fills the river with a liienacing,
muttering note as of a breathless^ ever-
driviiig gale. The waterway; so fair stboVe
atld wide beloWj flows oppressed hy bricks
arid mortar and stone, by blackeried timber
drid grimed ^laks ahd ru^ty irbUj colrered
with black barges, whipped up by paddles
and screwsj overbiirdened with craft, oVer-
hUrig with chairiSj overshadowed by Walls
making a stdep gorge for its bed, filled with
a haze of smbke and dust.

This stretch of the Thames from London
Bridge to the Albert Docks is td other
water - sides of rivet - pdrts what a virgin
fotest would be to a gardeh: It is a thing
grown upj not made. It recalls a jungle by
the confused, varied, and impenetrable as-
pect Of the buildingk that line the shdre^ not

the Faithful RiVef

iaGedrdiflg to & jiMnnga ptifpo^e; Btit as if
Spfiirig uj) hy adcideiit ffoiii ^battered feeeds.
Like the matted gfOwtH of bilShes and
eirdepers vfeilitig the silent depths of aii ttil-
expldfed wilderness, thfey hide the d^jJths df
London's infinitely varied, vigbfdtts, 's^Sth-t,
ia^ life. Ill othei- Hvdr-pdftS it is liot so.
They lie dpen to thfeir streatti, with tjtlk^s
like bfdad blearings^ with streets like a've-
liues dtlt through thibk tilhber for the Cdri-
Venieiice df trade. I aiii ihinkitlg faoW 8f
ri-iT-eir-pdrfes I have seen — of Antwerp, fdr iti-
Stanee ; df Nantes dr Bdrdeaiix; dt' even did
Rouenj where the hight-watchmeti of shijjs,
^IbdWS dn irailj gaze at shdp- Windows and
brilliant bafSs^ and see the audience go in
and cdttie dut df the opera-house. But
Ldttddn, the dldest and greatest df tir^t-
pdirts, does not pdsSess as much as a huh-
dted yafd^ df dpen quays Upon its rivdr-
ffont. Dark and impenetrable at night, likb
the fabe df a fofestj is Ldndon's water-side.
It is the wat^r-side of water -sides, whetfe
only one aspect of the World's life can be
seen, ahd ofaly one kind of hlen toils oh the
edge df the stream. Thfe lightless Walls

The Mirror of the Sea

seem to spring from the very mud upon
which the stranded barges lie; and the nar-
row lanes coming down to the foreshore re-
semble the paths of smashed bushes and
crumbled earth where big game comes to
drink on the banks of tropical streams.

Behind the growth of the London water-
side the docks of London spread out tmsus-
pected, smooth, and placid, lost among the
buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a
thick forest. They lie concealed in the in-
tricate growth of houses with a few stalks
of mast-heads here and there overtopping
the roof of some seven-story warehouse.

It is a strange conjunction, this, of roofs
and mast-heads, of walls and yard-arms. I
remember once having the incongruity of
the relation brought home to me in a prac-
tical way. I was the chief officer of a fine
ship, just docked with a cargo of wool from
Sydney, after a ninety days' passage. In
fact, we had not been in more than half an
hotir and I was still busy making her fast to
the stone posts of a very narrow quay in
front of a lofty warehouse. An old man
with a gray whisker under the chin and
i8o

The Faithful River

brass buttons on his pilot-cloth jacket, hur-
ried up along the quay hailing my ship by
name. He was one of those officials called
berthing - masters — not the one who had
berthed us, but another, who, apparently,
had been busy securing a steamer at the
other end of the dock. I could see from
afar his hard blue eyes staring at us, as if
fascinated, with a queer sort of absorption.
I wondered what that worthy sea-dog had
found to criticise in my ship's rigging. And
I, too, glanced aloft anxiously. I could see
nothing wrong there. But perhaps that
superannuated fellow-craftsman was simply
admiring the ship's perfect order aloft, I
thought with some secret pride; for the chief
officer is responsible for his ship's appear-
ance, and as to her outward condition, he is
the man open to praise or blame. Mean-
time the old salt ("ex-coasting skipper"
was writ large all over his person) had
hobbled up alongside in his bumpy, shiny
boots, and, waving an arm, short and thick
like the flipper of a seal, terminated by a
paw red as an uncooked beefsteak, addressed
the poop in a muffled, faint, roaring voice,
181

The Mirror bf the Sea

as if a ^airipte bf ^vfery Nbrth Sea fo| df his
life had been permanently lodged in his
thtoat: "Haul 'em found, Mr: Mkte!" were
his wdrds; "If you don't look sharp, ^ou'U
hkve your top) - gallant - yards throUgh the
windows of that 'ere warehouse presdntly."
Thife was the only cause of his interest in
the ship'^ beautiful spars. I dwn thai for a
tiriite I was struck dumb by the bizarre as-
sociations of yard-arms atid wifadoi^-panefe.
To break windows is the last thirig orie
would thiiik of in conn^ctiofa with a ship's
tojpt- gallant -yardj unless, indeed, one Were
an Experienced bterthing - ihdstfer in one of
th^ Lfondoh docks. This old chap was do-
ing his little share of the world's work with
proper efficifency. His little, blue eyes had
made out the danger many hundred yards
off. His rheumaticky feet^ tired with bal-
ancing that stjuat body f oi- many yedfs upon
the decks of siiiall coasters; and itiade sore
by hiiles of trairipirig upon the flag - fetdnds
bf the dock-side, had hurried up in time to
aveft a ridiculous catastrophe. I answered
him pettishly, I fear, and as if I had known
all about it befbre.

i82

The Faithful River

'•All right, q,ll right! can't do everything
at once."

He remained near by, muttering to hillir
self till the yards had been hauled round at
my order, and then raised again his foggy,
thick voice :

"None too soon,'' he observed, with a
critical glance up at the towering side pf the
warehouse. ' ' That's a half-sovereign in your
pocket, Mr. Mate. You should always look
first how you are for them windows before
you begin to breast in your ship t,o thP
quay.''

It was good advice. But one cannot
think of everything or foresee cpntapts pf
things apparently as remote as stars and
hop-poles.

The view of ships lying moored in some of
the older docks of Londoi^ has always sug-
gested to my mind the image of 3, flock pf
swans kept in the flooded back-yard qf grim
tenement-houses. The flatness of the waUs
sui«:^anding the dark pool on which they
183

The Mirror of the Sea

float brings out wonderftilly the flowing
grace of the lines on which a ship's hull is
built. The lightness of these forms, de-
vised to meet the winds and the seas, makes,
by contrast with the great piles of bricks,
the chains and cables of their moorings ap-
pear very necessary, as if nothing less could
prevent them from soaring upward and over
the roofs. The least puff of wind stealing
round the comers of the dock buildings stirs
these captives fettered to rigid shores. It is
as if the sotd of a ship were impatient of
confinement. Those masted hulls, relieved
of their cargo, become restless at the slight-
est hint of the wind's freedom. However
tightly moored, they range a little at their
berths, swaying imperceptibly the spirelike
assemblages of cordage and spars. You can
detect their impatience by watching the
sway of the mast-heads against the motion-
less, the soulless, gravity of mortar and
stones. As you pass alongside each hope-
less prisoner chained to the quay, the slight
grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes
a sound of angry muttering. But, after all,
it may be good for ships to go through a
184

The Faithful River

period of restraint and repose, as the re-
straint and self - communion of inactivity
may be good for an unruly soul — not, in-
deed, that I mean to say that ships are un-
ruly; on the contrary, they are faithful
creatures, as so many men can testify. And
faithfulness is a great restraint, the strongest
bond laid upon the self-will of men and ships
on,this globe of land and sea.

^his interval of bondage in the docks
rotinds each period of a ship's life with the
sense of accomplished duty, of an effectively
played part in the work of the world^ The
dock is the scene of what the world would
think the most serious part in the light,
bounding, swaying life of a ship. But there
are docks and docks. The ugliness of some
docks is appalling. Wild horses would not
drag from me the name of a certain rivdr in
the north whose narrow estuary is inhos-
pitable and dangerous, and whose docks are
like a nightmare of dreariness and misery.
Their dismal shores are studded thickly with
scaffold-like, enormous timber structures,
whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by
the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coal-
i8S

The Mirror Qf the 3ea

dust.. The mP^t important ingredierit for
getting tjie world's worlc alqiig i^ distributed
there under the cif pumstanpes of the greatest
cruelty rneted put to helpless ships, phut
up in the desqjg^te cirpuit pf these basing,
you w.quld think a free ship WP^ild d^Pop
and die liJi^e a wild bird put into 3. diftiy
cage, But R ship, perhq,ps because pf her
faithfulness to inen, will endurp an extraor-
dinary lot of ill-usftgp. Still, X have seen
§hipS is^ue from pertain dPPte li}<:e half-dead
prisoners frqni a dungeou, bedl'S'Sgl^di QYer-
porne, whpUy disguised iu di|-t, ^nd with
their i|ie^i rolling white eyeballs ir| blae|£
and worried fg^pps raised tP a heaven, whiph,
in its smoky ^.nd spiled aspect, seenied tP
reflect the sordid^ess pf thp earth belpw.
One thil^tg, however, may be said for the
dpcks of the port of Lqndpti on both sides
qf the pver: for all th^ complaints of thefr
irtsuffipient equipment, pf their obsolete
p^les, of failure (they say) iu the n^attef qf
quick despatch, fiq ship i^eed ever issue froiji
^heir gates iti a half - fainting condition.
](L(Ondon is S' gefieral cargo port, as is only
proper for the greatest capital qf the WPrl4
j8|5

The Faithful River

to be. General cargo ports belong to the
aristocracy of the eairth's trading - places,
and in that aristocracy London, as is its
way, has a unique physiognomy.

The absence of picturesqueness cannot be
laid to the charge of the docks opening into
the Thames. For all my unMnd compari-
son to swans and backyards, it cannot be
denied that each dock or group of docks!
along the north side of the river has its own;
individual attractiveness. Beginning with;
the cosey little St. Katherine's Dock, lying
overshadowed and black like a quiet pool
among rocky crags, through the venerable
and sympathetic London Docks, with not a
single line of rails in the whole of their area
and the aroma of spices lingering between
its warehouses, with their far-famed wine-
cellars — down through the interesting group
of West India Docks, the fine docks at
Blackwall, on past the Galleons Reach en-
trance of the Victoria and Albert Docks,
right down to the vast gloom of the great
basins in Tilbury, each of those places of
restraint for ships has its own peculiar phys-
iognomy, its own expression. And what

13 187

The Mirror of the Sea

makes them unique and attractive is their
common trait of being romantic in their
Usefulness.

In their way they are as romantic as the
river they serve is unlike all the other com-
mercial streams of the world. The cosiness
of the St. Katherine's Dock, the old-world
air of the London Docks, remain impressed
upon the memory. The docks down the
river, abreast of Woolwich, are imposing by
their proportions and the vast scale of the
ugliness that forms their surroundings —
ugliness so picturesque as to become a de-
light to the eye. When one talks of the
Thames docks "beauty" is a vain word, but
romance has lived too long upon this river
not to have thrown a mantle of glamour
upon its banks.

The antiquity of the port appeals to the
imagination by the long chain of adventu-
rous enterprises that had their inception in
the town and floated out into the world on
the waters of the river. Even the newest of
the docks, the Tilbury Dock, shares in the
glamour conferred by historical associations.
Queen Elizabeth has made one of her prog-
i88

The Faithful River

resses down there, not one of her journeys
of pomp and ceremony, but an anxious busi-
ness progress at a crisis of national history.
The menace of that time has passed away,
and now Tilbury is known by its docks.
These are very modern, but their remote-
ness and isolation upon the Essex marsh,
the days of failure attending their creation,
invested them with a romantic air. Noth-
ing in those days could have been more
striking than the vast, empty basins, sur-
rounded by miles of bare quays and the
ranges of cargo -sheds, where two or three
ships seemed lost like bewitched children
in a forest of gaunt, hydraulic cranes. One
received a wonderful impression of utter
abandonment, of wasted efficiency. From
the first the Tilbury Docks were very effi-
cient and ready for their task, but they had
come, perhaps, too soon into the field. A
great future lies before Tilbtiry Docks.
They shall never filla long-felt want (in the
sacramental phrase that is applied to rail-
ways, tunnels, newspapers, and new editions
of books). They were too early in the field.
The want shall never be felt because, free of
189

The Mirror of the Sea

the trammels of the tide, easy of access,
magnificent and desolate, they are already
there, prepared to take and keep the biggest
ships that float upon the sea. They are
worthy of the oldest river-port in the world.
And, truth to say, for all the criticisms
fltmg upon the heads of the dock com-
panies, the other docks of the Thames are
no disgrace to the town with a population
greater than that of some commonwealths.
The growth of London as a well-equipped
port has been slow, while not unworthy of a
great capital, of a great centre of distribu-
tion. It must not be forgotten that London
has not the backing of great industrial dis-
tricts or great fields of natural exploitation.
In this it differs from Liverpool, from Cardiff,
from Newcastle, from Glasgow ; and therein
the Thames differs from the Mersey, from
the Tyne, from the Clyde: It is a historical
taiver ; it is a romantic stream flowing through
the centre of great affairs, and for all the
criticisms of the river's administration, my
contention is that its development has been
worthy of its dignity. For a long time the
stream itself could accommodate quite easily
igo

The Faithful River

the oversea and coasting traffic. That was
in the days when, in the part called the
Pool, just below London Bridge, the vessels
moored stem and stern in the very strength
of the tide formed one solid mass like an
island covered with a forest of gaunt, leaf-
less trees ; and when the trade had grown too
big for the river, there came the St. Kath-
erine's Docks and the London Docks, mag-
nificent undertakings answering to the need
of their time. The same may be said of the
other artificial lakes full of ships that go in
and out upon this high-road to all parts of
the world. The labor of the imperial water-
way goes on from generation to generation,
goes on day and night. Nothing ever ar-
rests its sleepless industry but the coming of
a heavy fog, which clothes the teeming
stream in a mantle of impenetrable stillness.
After the gradual cessation of all sound
and movement on the faithful river, only
the ringing of ships' bells is heard, mysteri-
ous and muffled in the white vapor from
London Bridge right down to the Nore, for
miles and miles in a decrescendo tinkling, to
where the estuary broadens out into th^
191

The Mirror of the Sea

North Sea, and the anchored ships lie scat-
tered thinly in the shrouded channels be-
tween the sand - banks of the Thames 's
mouth. Through the long and glorious tale
of years of the river's strenuous service to
its people these are its only breathing times.

In Captivity

SHIP in dock, surrounded by-
quays and the walls of ware-
I houses, has the appearance of
a prisoner meditating upon f ree-
' dom in the sadness of a free
spirit put under restraint. Chain cables
and stout ropes keep her bound to stone
posts at the edge of a paved shore, and
a berthing - master, with brass buttons on
his coat, walks about like a weather-beaten
and ruddy jailer, casting jealous, watchful
glances upon the moorings that fetter a ship
lying passive and still and safe, as if lost in
deep regrets of her days of liberty and
danger on the sea.

The swarm of renegades — dock-masters,

berthing-masters, gatemen, and such like —

appear to nurse an immense distrust of

the captive ship's resignation. There never

193

The Mirror of the Sea

seem chains and ropes enough to satisfy
their minds concerned with the safe binding
of free ships to the strong, muddy, enslaved
earth. "You had better put another bight
of a hawser astern, Mr. Mate," is the usual
phrase in their mouths. I brand them for
renegades, because most of them have been
sailors in their time. As if the infirmities of
old age — ^the gray hair, the wrinkles at the
corners of the eyes, and the knotted veins
of the hands — ^were the symptoms of moral
poison, they prowl about the quays with an
underhand air of gloating over the broken
spirit of noble captives. They want rnore
fenders, more breasting-ropes ; they want
more springs, more shackles, more fetters;
they want to make ships with volatile soiils
as motionless as square blocks of stone.
They stand on the mud of pavements, these
degraded sea-dogs, with long lines of rail-
way trucks clanking their coupUngs behind
their backs, and run malevolent glances over
your ship from head -gear to tafirail, only
wishing to t3rrannize over the poor creature,
under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence
and care. Here and there cargo-cranes look-
194

In Captivity

ing like instruments of torture for ships
swing cruel hooks at the end of long chains.
Gangs of dock-laborers swarm with muddy
feet over the gangways. It is a moving
sight this, of so many men of the earth
earthy, who never cared anything for a ship,
trampling tmconcerned, brutal and hob-
nailed upon her helpless body.

Fortunately, nothing can deface the beau-
ty of a ship. That sense of a dungeon, that
sense of a horrible and degrading misfort-j
une overtaking a creature fair to see and I
safe to trust, attaches only to ships moored/
in the docks of great European ports. You
feel that they are dishonestly locked up, to
be hunted about from wharf to wharf on a
dark, greasy, square pool of black water as
a brutal reward at the end of a faithful
voyage.

A ship anchored in an open roadstead,
with cargo -lighters alongside and her own
tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is
accompUshing in freedom a function of her
life. There is no restraint; there is space:
clear water around her, and a clear sky
above her niast-heads, with a landscape of
^95

The Mirror of the Sea

green hills and charming bays opening
around her anchorage. She is not aban-
doned by her own men to the tender mercies
of shore people. She still shelters, and is
looked after by, her own little, devoted band,
and you feel that presently she will glide be-
tween the headlands and disappear. It is
only at home, in dock, that she lies aban-
doned, shut off from freedom by all the
artifices of men that think of quick despatch
and profitable freights. It is only then that
the odious, rectangular shadows of walls
and roofs fall upon her decks, with showers
of soot.

To a man who has never seen the ex-
traordinary nobility, strength, and grace
that the devoted generations of ship-builders
have evolved from some pure nooks of their
simple sotds, the sight that could be seen
five-and-twenty years ago, of a large fleet of
clippers moored along the north side of the
New South Dock was an inspiring spectacle.
Then there was a quarter of a mile of them,
from the iron dockyard - gates guarded by
policemen, in a long, forest-like perspective
of masts, moored two and two to many
196

In Captivity

stout wooden jetties. Their spars dwarfed
with their loftiness the corrugated-iron sheds,
their jib-booms extended far over the shore,
their white-and-gold figure-heads, almost daz-
zling in their purity, overhung the straight,
long quay above the mud and dirt of the
wharf -side, with the dwarfed figures of groups
and single men moving to and fro, rest-
less and grimy under their soaring immo-
bility.

At tide-time you would see one of the
loaded ships with battened-down hatches
drop out of the ranks and float in the clear
space of the dock, held by lines dark and
slender, like the first threads of a spider's
web, extending from her bows and her
quarters to the mooring - posts on shore.
There, graceful and still, like a bird ready to
spread its wings, she waited till, at the open-
ing of the gates, a tug or two would hurry
in noisily, hovering round her with an air of
fuss and solicitude, and take her out into
the river, tending, shepherding her through
open bridges, through dam -like gates be-
tween the fiat pier -heads, with a bit of
green lawn surrounded by gravel and a
197

The Mirror of the Sea

white signal-mast with yard and gaff, fly-
ing a couple of dingy blue, red, or white
flags.

This New South Dock (it was its official
name), round which my earlier professional
memories are centred, belongs to the group
of West India Docks, together with two
smaller and much older basins called Im-
port and Export respectively, both with the
greatness of their trade departed from them
alrearly. Picturesque and clean as docks go,
these twin basins spread side by side the
dark lustre of their glassy water, sparely
peopled by a few ships laid up on buoys
or tucked far away from one another at the
end of sheds in the corners of empty quays,
where they seemed to slumber quietly re-
mote, untouched by the bustle of men's
affairs — in retreat rather than in captivity.
They were quaint and sympathetic, those
two homely basins, unfurnished and silent,
with no aggressive display of cranes, no ap-
paratus of hurry and work on their narrow
shores. No railway lines cumbered them.
The knots of laborers troopiiig in clumsily
round the comers of cargo-sheds to eat their
198

In Captivity

food in peace out of red cotton handkerchiefs
had the air of picnicking by the side of a
lonely mountain pool. They were restful
(and I should say very unprofitable), those
basins, where the chief officer of one of the
ships involved in the harassing, strenuous,
noisy activity of the New South Dock only
a few yards away could escape in the din-
ner-hour to stroll, unhampered by men and
affairs, meditating (if he chose) on the
vanity of all things human. At one time
they must have been full of good, qld, slow
West Indiamen of the square-stern type,
that took their captivity, one imagines, as
stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of
the waves with their blunt, honest bows,
and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses, coffee,
or logwood sedately with their own winch
and tackle. But when I knew them, of ex-
ports there was never a sign that one could
detect ; and all the imports I have ever seen
were some rare cargoes of tropical timber,
enormous balks roughed out of iron trunks
grown in the woods about the Gulf of
Mexico. They lay piled up in stacks of
mighty boles, and it was hard to believe
199

The Mirror of the Sea

that all this mass of dead and stripped trees
had come out of the flanks of a slender, in-
nocent - looking little bark with, as likely
as not, a homely woman's name — ^EUen this
or Annie that — ^upon her fine bows. But
this is generally the case with a discharged
cargo. Once spread at large over the quay,
it looks the most impossible bulk to have
all come there out of that ship along-
side.

They were quiet, serene nooks in the busy
world of docks, these basins where it has
never been my good luck to get a berth
after some more or less arduous passage.
But one could see at a glance that men and
ships were never hustled there. They were
so quiet that, remembering them well, one
comes to doubt that they ever existed —
places of repose for tired ships to dream in,
places of meditation rather than work,
where wicked ships — ^the cranky, the lazy,
the wet, the bad sea-boats, the wild^steerers,
the capricious, the pig-headed, the generally
ungovernable — would have full leisure to
take count and repent of their sins, sorrow-
ful and naked, with their rent garments of
200

In Captivity

sail-cloth stripped off them and with the
dust and ashes of the London atmosphere
upon their mast-heads. For that the worst
of ships would repent if she were evdr given
time I make no doubt. I have known too
many of them. No ship is wholly bad ; and
now that their bodies that had braved so
many tempests have been blown off the face I
of the sea by a puff of steam, the evil and
the good together into the limbo of things
that have served their time, there can be
no harm in affirming that in these van-
ished generations of willing servants there
never has been one utterly unredeemable
soul.

In the New South Dock there was cer-
tainly no time for remorse, introspection,
repentance, or any phenomena of inner life
either for the captive ships or for their offi-
cers. From six in the morning till six at
night the hard labor of the prison-house,
which rewards the valiance of ships that win
the harbor, went on steadily, great slings of
general cargo swinging over the rail, to drop
plumb into the hatchways at the sign of the
gangway-tender's hand. The New South

201

The Mirror of the Sea

Dock was especially a loading dock for the
colonies in those great (and last) days of
smart wool-clippers, good to look at and —
well — exciting to handle. Some of them
were more fair to see than the others ; many
were (to put it mildly) somewhat over-
masted; all were expected to make good
passages ; and of all that line of ships, whose
rigging made a thick, enormous net - work
against the sky, whose brasses flashed al-
most as far as the eye of the policeman at
the gates could reach, there was hardly one
that knew of any other port among all the
ports on the wide earth but London and
Sydney, or London and Melbourne, or Lon-
don and Adelaide, perhaps with Hobart
Town added for those of smaller tonnage.
One could almost have believed, as her gray-
whiskered second mate used to say of the

old Duke of S , that they knew the road

to the antipodes better than their own
skippers, who, year in, year out, took them
from London^— the place of captivity —
to some Australian port where, twenty-
five years ago, though pioored well and
tight enough to the wooden wharves, they
202

In Captivity

felt themselves no captives, but honored
guests.

These towns of the antipodes, not so
great then as they are now, took an interest
in the shipping, the rtmning links with
"home," whose numbers confirmed the
sense of their growing importance. They
made it part and parcel of their daily in-
terests. This was especially the case in
Sydney, where, from the heart of the fair
city, down the vista of important streets,
could be seen the wool-clippers lying at the
Circular Qiiay — no walled prison-house of a
dock that, but the integral part of one of
the finest, most beautiftd, vast, and safe
bays the siui ever shone upon. Now great
steam-liners lie at these berths, always re-
served for the sea aristocracy-^grand and
imposing enough ships, but here to-day and
gone next Week; whereas the general cargo,
emigrant, and passenger clippers of my
time, rigged with heavy spars, and built on
fine lines, used to remain for months to-

14 aP3

The Mirror of the Sea

gether waiting for their load of wool. Their
names attained the dignity of household
words. On Sundays and holidays the citi-
zens trooped down, on visiting bent, and the
lonely officer on duty solaced himself by
playing the cicerone — especially to the citi-
zenesses with engaging manners and a well-
developed sense of the fun that may be got
out of the inspection of a ship's cabins and
state-rooms. The tinkle of more or less un-
tuned cottage pianos floated out of open
stern - ports till the gas - lamps began to
twinkle in the streets, and the ship's night-
watchman, coming sleepily on duty after
his unsatisfactory day sltunbers, hauled
down the flags and fastened a lighted lan-
tern at the break of the gangway. The
night closed rapidly upon the silent ships
with their crews on shore. Up a short,
steep ascent by the King's Head pub.,
patronized by the cooks and stewards of the
fleet, the voice of a man crying "Hot sav-
eloys!" at the end of George Street, where
the cheap eating-houses (sixpence a meal)
were kept by Chinamen (Sun-kum-on's was
not bad), is heard at regular intervals. I
204

In Captivity

have listened for hours to this most perti-
nacious peddler (I wonder whether he is
dead or has made a fortune), while sitting

on the rail of the old Duke of S (she's

dead, poor thing! a violent death on the
coast of New Zealand), fascinated by the
monotony, the regularity, the abruptness of
the recurring cry, and so exasperated at the
absurd spell, that I wished the fellow would
choke himself to death with a mouthful of
his own infamous wares.

A stupid job, and fit only for an old man,
my comrades used to tell nje, to be thj
night-watchman of a captive (though hon-
ored) ship. And generally the oldest of the
able seamen in a ship's crew does get it.
But sometimes neither the oldest nor any
other fairly steady seaman is forthcoming.
Ships' crews had the trick of melting away
SAAdftly in those days. So, probably on ac-
count of my youth, innocence, and pensive
habits (which made me sometimes dilatory
in my work about the rigging), I was sud-
denly nominated, in our chief mate Mr.
B 's most sardonic tones, to that en-
viable situation. I do not regret the ex-

20S

The Mirror of the Sea

perlence. The night humors of the town
descended from the street to the water-side
in the still watches of the night: larrikins
rushing down in bands to settle some quarrel
by a stand-up fight, away from the police,
in an indistinct ring half hidden by piles of
cargo, with the sounds of blows, a groan
now and then, the stamping of feet, and the
cry of "Time!" rising suddenly above the
sinister and excited murmurs; night-prowl-
ers, pursued or pursuing, with a stifled .
shriek followed by a profound silence, or
slinking stealthily alongside like ghosts, and
addressing me from the quay below in mys-
terious tones with incomprehensible proposi-
tions. The cabmen, too, who twice a week,
on the night when the A. S. N. Company's
passenger-boat was due to arrive, used to
range a battalion of blazing lamps opposite
the ship, were very amusing in their way.
They got down from their perches and told
one another impolite stories in racy language,
every word of which reached me distinctly
over the bulwarks as I sat smoking on the
main-hatch. On one occasion I had an hour
or so of a most intellectual conversation
206

In Captivity

with a person whom I cotild not see dis-
tinctly, a gentleman from England, he said,
with a cultivated voice, I on deck and he
on the quay sitting on the case of a piano
(landed out of our hold that very after-
noon), and smoking a cigar which smelled
very good. We touched, in our discourse,
upon science, politics, natural history, and-
operatic singers. Then, after remarking
abruptly, "You seem to be rather intelli-
gent, my man," he informed me pointedly
that his name was Mr. Senior, and walked
off — to his hotel, I suppose. Shadows!
Shadows! I think I saw a white whisker as
he turned under the lamp-post. It is a
shock to think that in the natural course of
nature he must be dead by now. There was
nothing to object to in his intelligence but a
little dogmatism maybe. And his name was
Senior! Mr. Senior!

The position had its drawbacks, however.
One wintry, blustering, dark night in July,
as I stood sleepily out of the rain under the
crease of the poop something resembling an
ostrich dashed up the gangway. I say os-
trich because the creature, though it ran on
207

The Mirror of the Sea

two legs, appeared to help its progress by
working a pair of short wings ; it was a man,
however, only his coat, ripped up the back
and flapping in two halves about his head,
gave him that weird and fowl-like appear-
ance. At least, I suppose it was his coat,
for it was impossible to make him out dis-
tinctly. How he managed to come so
straight upon me, at speed and without a
sttunble over a strange deck, I carmot im-
agine. He must have been able to see in
the dark better than any cat. He over-
whelmed me with panting entreaties to let
him take shelter till morning in our fore-
castle. Following my strict orders, I re-
fused his request, mildly at first, in a sterner
tone as he insisted with growing impudence.

"For (jod's sake let me, matey! Some of
'em are after me — and I've got hold of a
ticker here."

"You clear out of this!" I said.

" Don't be hard on a chap, old man!" he
whined, pitifully.

" Now then, get ashore at once. Do you
hear?"

Silence. He appeared to cringe, mute, as
208

In Captivity

i£ words had failed him through grief, then
— ^bang! came a concussion and a great flash
of light in which he vanished, leaving me
prone on my back with the most abomi-
nable black eye that anybody ever got in
the faithful discharge of duty. Shadows!
Shadows! I hope he escaped the enemies
he was fleeing from to live and flourish to
this day. But his fist was uncommonly
hard and his aim miraculously true in the
dark.

There were other experiences, less painful
and more funny for the most part, with one
among them of a dramatic complexion; but
the greatest experience of them all was Mr.
B , our chief mate himself.

He used to go ashore every night to fore-
gather in some hotel's parlor with his crony,
the mate of the bark Cicero, lying on the
other side of the Circular Quay. Late at
night I would hear from afar their stumbling
footsteps and their voices raised in endless
argtiment. The mate of the Cicero was see-
ing his friend on board. They would con-
tinue their senseless and muddled discourse
in tones of profound friendship for half an
209

The Mirror of the Sea

hour or so at the shore end of our gangway,

and then I would hear Mr. B insisting

that he must see the other on board his ship.
And away they would go, their voices, stiU
conversing with excessive amity, being heard
moving all round the harbor. It happened
more than once that they would thus per-
ambulate three or four times the distance,
each seeing the other on board his ship out
of pure and disinterested affection. Then,
through sheer weariness, or perhaps in a
moment of forgetfulness, they would man-
age to part from each other somehow, and
by-and-by the planks of our long gangway
would bend and creak under the weight of
Mr. B coming on board for good at last.

On the rail his burly form would stop and
stand swaying.

"Watchman!"

"Sir."

A pause.

He waited for a moment of steadiness be-
fore negotiating the three steps of the inside
ladder from rail to deck ; and the watchman,
taught by experience, would forbear offering
help which would be received as an insult at

2IO

In Captivity

that partictdar stage of the mate's return.
But many times I trembled for his neck.
He was a heavy man.

Then with a rush and a thump it would be
done. He never had to pick himself up;
but it took him a minute or so to ptill him-
self together after the descent.

"Watchman!"

"Yes, sir."

"Captain aboard?"

"Yes, sir."

Pause.

"Dog aboard?"

"Yes, sir."

Pause.

Our dog was a gaimt and unpleasant
beast, more like a wolf in poor health than

a dog, and I never noticed Mr. B at any

other time show the slightest interest in the
doings of the animal. But that question
never failed.

" Let's have yotu- arm to steady me along. "

I was always prepared for that request.
He leaned on me heavily till near enough
the cabin door to catch hold of the handle.
Then he would let go my arm at once.

211

The Mirror of the Sea

"That '11 do. I can manage now."

And he could manage. He could manage
to find his way into his berth, light his lamp,
get into his bed — ay, and get out of it when
I called him at half-past five, the first man
on deck, lifting the cup of morning coffee to
his lips with a steady hand, ready for duty
as though he had virtuously slept ten solid
hours — a better chief officer than many a
man who had never tasted grog in his life.
He could manage all that, but could never
manage to get on in life.

Only once he failed to catch hold of the
cabin -door handle at the first grab. He
waited a little, tried again, and again failed.
His weight was growing heavier on my arm.
He sighed slowly.

"D—n that handle!"

Without letting go his hold of me he turn-
ed about, his face lit up bright as day by the
full moon.

"I wish she were out at sea," he growled,
savagely.

"Yes, sir."

I felt the need to say something, because
he htmg on to me as if lost, breathing heavily.

212

In Captivity

"Ports are no good — ships rot, men go to
the devil!"

I kept still, and after a while he repeated
with a sigh :

" I wish she were at sea out of this."

"So do I, sir," I ventured.

Holding my shotdder, he turned upon me.

"You! What's that to you where she is?
You don't — drink."

And even on that night he "managed it"
at last. He got hold of the handle. But
he did not manage to light his lamp (I don't
think he even tried), though in the morning
as usual he was the first on deck, bull-
necked, curly-headed, watching the hands
turn-to with his sardonic expression and un-
flinching gaze.

I met him ten years afterwards, casually,
unexpectedly, in the street, on coming out
of my consignee office. I was not likely to
have forgotten him with his "I can manage
now." He recognized me at once, remem-
bered my name, and in what ship I had
served under his orders. He looked me
over from head to foot.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.
213

The Mirror of the Sea

"I am commanding a little bark," I said,
' ' loading here for Mauritius. " Then, thought-
lessly, I added: "And what are you doing,
Mr. B -?"

"I," he said, looking at me unflinchingly,
with his old sardonic grin, "I am looking
for something to do."

I felt I would rather have bitten out my
tongue. His jet-black, curly hair had turn-
ed iron-gray; he was scrupulously neat as
ever, but frightfully threadbare. His shiny
boots were worn down at heel. But he for-
gave me, and we drove ofiE together in a
hansom to dine on board my ship. He went
over her conscientiously, praised her heartily,
congratulated me on my command with ab-
solute sincerity. At dinner, as I offered him
wine and beer he shook his head, and as I
sat looking at him interrogatively, muttered
in an undertone:

"I've given up all that."

After dinner we came again on deck. It
seemed as though he could not tear himself
away from the ship. We were fitting some
new lower rigging, and he hung about, ap-
proving, suggesting, giving me advice in his
214

In Captivity

old manner. Twice he addressed me as
"My boy," and corrected himself quicMy to
"Captain." My mate was about to leave
me (to get married), but I concealed the fact

from Mr. B ■. I was afraid he would ask

me to give him the berth in some ghastly
jocular hint that I could not refuse to take.
I was afraid. It would have been impos-
sible. I could not have given orders to Mr.

B , and I am sure he would not have

taken them from me very long. He could
not have managed that, though he had man-
aged to break himself from drink — too late.

He said good-bye at last. As I watched
his burly, bull-necked figtu-e walk away up
the street, I wondered with a sinking heart
whether he had much more than the price" of
a night's lodging in his pocket. And I un-
derstood that if that very minute I were to
call out after him, he would not even turn his
head. He, too, is no more than a shadow,
but I seem to hear his words spoken on the
moonlit deck of the old Duke of S :

"Ports are no good — ships rot, men go to
the devil!"

Initiation

?HIPS!" exclaimed an elderly
seaman in clean, shore togs.
"Ships!" — and his keen glance,
turning away from my face,
, ran along the vista of magnifi-
cent figure-heads that in the late seventies
used to overhang in a serried rank the
muddy pavement by the side of the New
South Dock — "ships are all right; it's the
men in 'em. . . ."

Fifty hulls, at least, moulded on lines of
beauty and speed— hulls of wood, of iron,
expressing in their forms the highest achieve-
ment of modern ship-building — lay moored
all in a row, stem to quay, as if assembled
there for an exhibition, not of a great in-
dustry, but of a great art. Their colors
were gray, black, dark-green, with a narrow
strip of yellow moulding defining their sheer,
216

Initiation

or with a row of painted ports decking in
warlike decoration their robust flanks of
cargo-carriers that would know no triumph
but of speed in carrying a burden, no glory
other than of a long service, no victory but
that of an endless, obscure contest with thef
sea. The great empty hulls with swept
holds, just out of dry-dock, with their paint
glistening freshly, sat high-sided with pon-
derous dignity alongside the wooden jetties,
looking more like unmovable buildings than
things meant to go afloat ; others, half load-
ed, far on the way to recover the true sea-
physiognomy of a ship brought down to her
load-line, looked more accessible. Their less
, steeply slanting gangways seemed to invite
the strolling sailors in search of a berth to
walk on board and try "for a chance" with
the chief mate, the guardian of a ship's effi-
ciency. As if anxious to remain unper-
ceived among their. overtopping sisters, two
or three "finished" ships floated low, with
an air of straining at the leash of their level
headfasts, exposing to view their cleared
decks and covered hatches, prepared to drop
stem first out of the laboring ranks, display-
217

The Mirror of the Sea

ing the true comeliness of form which only
her proper sea -trim gives to a ship. And
for a good quarter of a mile, from the dock-
yard-gate to the farthest corner, where the
old housed-in hulk, the President (drill-ship
then of the Naval Reserve), used to lie with
her frigate side rubbing against the stone of
the quay,, above all these hulls, ready and
unready, a hundred and fifty lofty masts,
more or less, held out the web of their rig-
ging like an immense net, in whose close
mesh, black against the sky, the heavy yards
seemed to be entangled and suspended.

It was a sight. The humblest craft that
floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the
faithfulness of her life; and this was the
place where one beheld the aristocracy of
ships. It was a noble gathering of the fair-
est and the swiftest, each bearing at the
bow the carved emblem of her name, as in
a gallery of plaster-casts, figures of women
with mural crowns, women with flowing
robes, with gold fillets on their hair or blue
scarves rotmd their waists, stretching out
rounded arms as if to point the way; heads
of men helmeted or bare; full lengths of
218

Initiation

warriors, of kings, of statesmen, of , lords and
princesses, all white from top to toe; with
here and there a dusky, turbaned figure, be-
dizened in many colors, of some Eastern
sultan or hero, all inclined forward under
the slant of mighty bowsprits as if eager to
begin another run of eleven thousand miles
in their leaning attitudes. These were thq
fine figure-heads of the finest ships afloat.
But why, unless for the love of the life those
eff5gies shared with us in their wandering
impassivity, should one try to reproduce in^
words an impression of whose fidelity there
can be no critic and no judge, since such an
exhibition of the art of ship-building and.
the art of figure-head carving as was seen
from year's end to year's end in the open^
air gallery of the New South Dock no man's
eye shall behold again? All, that patient,
pale company of queens and princesses, of
kings and warriors, of allegorical women, of
heroines and statesmen and heathen gods,
crowned, helmeted, bareheaded, has run for
good off the sea, stretching to the last above
the. tumbling foam their fair, rounded arms,
holding out their spears, swords, shields,
« 219

The Mirror of the Sea

tridents in the same unwearied, striving-for-
ward pose. And nothing remains but Hnger-
ing perhaps in the memory of a few men, the
sound of their names, vanished a long time
ago from the first page of the great London
daiHes; from big posters in railway stations
and the doors of shipping-offices; from the
minds of sailors, dock-masters, pilots, and
tugmen; from the hail of grufE voices and
the flutter of signal-flags exchanged between
ships closing upon each other and drawing
apart in the open immensity of the sea.

The elderly, respectable seaman, with-
drawing his gaze from that multitude of
spars, gave me a glance to make sure of our
fellowship in the craft and mystery of the
sea. We had met casually, and had got
into contact as I had stopped near him, my
attention being caught by the same peculi-
arity he was looking at in the rigging of an
obviously new ship, a ship with her reputa-
tion all to make yet in the talk of the sea-
men who were to share their life with her.
Her name was already on their lips. I had
heard it uttered between two thick, red-
necked fellows of the semi - nautical type
220

Initiation

at the Fenchtirch Street railway station,
where, in those days, the every - day male
crowd was attired in jerseys and pilot-cloth
mostly, and had the air of being more con-
versant with the times of high-water than
with the times of the trains. I had noticed
that new ship's name on the first page of
my morning paper. I had stared at the un-
familiar grouping of its letters, blue on white
ground, on the advertisement boards, when-
ever the train came to a stand-still alongside
one of the shabby, wooden, wharf-like plat-
forms of the dock railway line. She had
been named, with proper observances, on
the day she came off the stocks, no doubt,
but she was very far yet from "having a
name." Untried, ignorant of the ways of
the sea, she had been thrust among that re-
nowned company of ships to load for her;
maiden voyage. There was nothing tol
vouch for her soundness and the worth of j
her character but the reputation of the
building - yard whence she was launched'
headlong into the world of waters. She
looked modest to me. I imagined her diffi-
dent, lying very quiet, with her side nestling

221

The Mirror of the Sea

shyly against the wharf to which she was
made fast with very new lines, intimidated
by the company of her tried and experi-
enced sisters already familiar with all the
violences of the ocean and the exacting love
of men. They had had more long voyages
to make their names in than she had known
weeks of carefully tended life, for a new ship
receives as much attention as if she were a
young bride. Even crabbed old dock-mas-
ters look at her with benevolent eyes. In
her shyness at the threshold of a labori-
ous and uncertain life, where so much is ex-
pected of a ship, she could not have been
better heartened and comforted, had she
only been able to hear and understand, than
by the tone of deep conviction in which
my elderly, respectable seaman repeated the
first part of his saying, "Ships are aU

right "

His civility prevented him from repeating
the other, the bitter part. It had occurred
to him that it was perhaps indelicate to in-
sist. He had recognized in me a ship's ofH-
cer, very possibly looking for a berth like
himself, and so far a comrade, but still a

222

Initiation

man belonging to that sparsely peopled
after-end of a ship, where a great part of
her reputation as a "good ship," in sea-
man's parlance, is made or marred.

"Can you say that of all ships without
exception?" I asked, being in an idle mood,
because, if an obvious ship's officer, I was
not, as a matter of fact, down at the docks
to "look for a berth," an occupation as en-
grossing as gambling, and as little favorable
to the free exchange of ideas, besides being
destructive of the kindly temper needed for
casual intercourse with one's fellow-creatures.

"You can always put up with 'em,"
opined the respectable seaman judicially.

He was not averse from talking, either.
If he had come down to the dock to look
for a berth, he did not seem oppressed by
anxiety as to his chances. He had the
serenity of a man whose estimable character
is fortunately expressed by his personal ap-
pearance in an unobtrusive yet convincing
maimer which no chief officer in want of
hands could resist. And, true enough, I
learned presently that the mate- of the
Hyperion had "taken down" his name for
223

The Mirror of the Sea

quartermaster. "We sign on Friday, and
join next day for the morning tide," he re-
marked, in a deliberate, careless tone, which
contrasted strongly with his evident readi-
ness to stand there yarning for an hour or
so with an utter stranger.

"Hyperion," I said. "I don't remember
ever seeing that ship anywhere. What sort
of a name has she got?"

It appeared from his discursive answer
that she had not much of a name one way
or another. She was not very fast. It took
no fool, though, to steer her straight, he be-
lieved. Some years ago he had seen her in
Calcutta, and he remembered being told by
somebody then that on her passage up the
river she had carried away both her hawse-
pipes. But that might have been the
pilot's fault. Just now, yarning with the
apprentices on board, he had heard that
this very voyage, brought up in the Downs,
outward-bound, she broke her sheer, struck
adrift, and lost an anchor and chain. But
that might have occurred through want
of careful tending in a tideway. All the
same, this looked as though she were pretty
224

Initiation

hard on her ground-tackle. Didn't it ? She
seemed a heavy ship to handle, anyway.
For the rest, as she had a new captain and a
new mate this voyage, he understood, one
couldn't say how she would turn out. . . .

In such marine shore-talk as this is the
name of a ship slowly established, her fame
made for her, the tale of her qualities and
of her defects kept, her idiosyncrasies com-
mented upon with the zest of personal gos-
sip, her achievements made much of, her
faults glossed over as things that, being
without remedy in our imperfect world,
should not be dwelt upon too much by men
who, with the help of ships, wrest out a
bitter living from the rough grasp of the
sea. All that talk makes up her "name,"
which is handed over from one crew to an-
other without bitternes.s, without animosity,
with the indulgence of mutual dependence,
and with the feeling of close association in
the exercise of her perfections and in the
danger of her defects.

This feeling explains men's pride in ships.
"Ships are all right," as my middle-aged,
respectable quartermaster said with much

225

The Mirror of the Sea

conviction and some irony ; but they are not
exactly what men make them. They have
their own nature; they can of themselves
minister to our self-esteem by the demand
their qualities make upon our skill and their
shortcomings upon our hardiness and en-
dttrance. Which is the more flattering ex-
action it is hard to say ; but there is the fact
that in listening for upward of twenty years
to the sea-talk that goes on afloat and
ashore I have never detected the true note
of animosity. I won't deny that at sea,
sometimes, the note of profanity was audi-
ble enough in those chiding interpellations
a wet, cold, weary seaman addresses to his
ship, and i'n moments of exasperation is dis-
posed to extend to all ships that ever were
launched — to the whole everlastingly ex-
acting brood that swims in deep waters.
And I have heard curses launched at the
unstable element itself, whose fascination,
outlasting the accumulated experience of
ages, had captured him as it had captured
the generations of his forebears.

For all that has been said of the love that
gertain natures (on shore) have professed to
226

Initiation

feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been
the object of in prose and song, the sea has
never been friendly to man. I At most it has .
been the accomplice of human restlessness,
and playing the part of dangerous abettor of
world-wide ambitions. Faithful to no racfe
after the manner of the kindly earth, re-
ceiving no impress from valor and toil and]
self-sacrifice, recognizing no finality of do- 1
minion, the sea has never adopted the cause/
of its masters like those lands where the
victorious nations of mankind have taken
root, rocking their cradles and setting^^wp
their gravestones. He — man or people —
who, putting his trust in the friendship of
the sea, neglects the strengtjh^ and cunning
of his right hand, is a fool! /As if. it were
too great, too mighty for common virtues,
the ocean has no compassion, no faith, no
law, no niemory. its fickleness is to be tield
LfUB'Lo men's purposes only by an undaunt-
ed resolution, and by a sleepless, armed,
jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there
has always been more hate than love. Odi
et amo may well be the confession of those
who consciously or blindly have surrendered
227

The Mirror of the Sea

their existence to the fascination of the sea.
All the tempestuous passions of mankind's
young days, the love of loot and the love of
glory, the love of adventure and the love of
danger, with the great love of the unknown
and vast dreams of dominion and power,
have passed like images reflected from a
mirror, leaving no record*upon~"tlT5 myste-
rioaa- face of the sea. Impenetrable and
heartless, the sea has gi ven nothin g of itself
to th e suitors for its prec arious favors. Un-
like the earth, it cannot be subjugated at
any cost of patience and toil. For all its
fascination that has lured so many to a vio-
lent death, its immensity has never been
loved as the mountains, the plains, the
desert itself, have been loved. Indeed, I
suspect that, leaving aside the protestations
and tributes of writers who, one is safe in
saying, care for little else in the world than
the rhythm of their lines and the cadence of
their phrase, the love of the sea, to which
some men and nations confess so readily, is
a complex sentiment wherein pride enters
for much, necessity for not a little, and the
love of ships — the untiring servants of our
228

Initiation

hopes and our self-esteem — ^for the best and
most genuine part. For the hundreds who
have reviled the sea, beginning with Shake-
speare in the line —

" More fell than htmger, anguish, or the sea,"

down to the last obscure sea-dog of the " old
model," having but few words and still
fewer thoughts, there could not be found, I
believe, one sailor who has ever coupled a
curse with the good or bad name of a ship.
If ever his profanity, provoked by the hard-
ships of the sea, went so far as to touch his
ship, it would be lightly, as a hand may,
without sin, be laid in the way of kindness
on a woman.

The love that is given to ships is pro-
foundly different from the love men feel for ^
every other work of their hands — the love
they bear to their houses, for instance — ^be-
cause it is untainted by the pride of posses-
sion. The pride of skill, the pride of re-
229

The Mirror of the Sea

sponsibility, the pride of endurance there
may be, but otherwise it is a disinterested
sentiment. No seaman ever cherished a
ship, even if she belonged to him, merely
because of the profit she put in his pocket.
No one, 'I think, ever did; for a ship-owner,
even of the best, has always been outside
the pale of that sentiment embracing in a
feeling of intimate, equal fellowship the ship
and the man, backing each other against
the implacable, if sometimes dissembled,
hostility of their world of waters. The sea
— this truth must be confessed — has no gen-
erosity. No display of manly qualities —
Acourage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness
— has ever been known to touch its irre-
sponsible consciousness of power. The ocean
has the conscienceless temper of a savage
autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He
cannot brook the slightest appearance of de-
fiance, and has remained the irreconcilable
enemy of ships and men ever since ships and
men had the unheard of audacity to go
afloat together in the face of his frown.
From that day he has gone on swallowing
up fleets and . men without his resentment
230

Initiation

being glutted by the number of victims — ^by
so many wrecked ships and wrecked lives.
To-day, as ever, he is ready to beguile and
betray, to smash and to drown the incorri-
gible optimism of men who, backed by the
fidelity of ships, are trying to wrest from
him the fortune of their house, the dominion
of their world, or only a dole of food for
their hunger. If not always in the hot
mood to smash, he is always stealthily ready
for a drowning. The most amazing wonder
of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.

I felt its dread for the first time in mid-
Atlantic one day, many years ago, when we
took off the crew of a Danish brig homeward-^
bound froin the West Indies. A thin, Silvery
mist softened the calm and majestic splendor
of light without shadows — seemed to render
the sky less remote and the ocean less im-
mense. It was one of the days when the
might of the sea(€5pea,j:s indeed lovable, like
the nature of a sffong man in moments of
quiet intimacy. At sunrise we had made
out a black speck to the westward, appar-
ently suspended high up in the void behind
a stirring, shifnmering veil of silvery blue
231

The Mirror of the Sea

gauze that seemed at times to stir and float
in the breeze which fanned us slowly along.
The peace of that enchanting forenoon was
so profound, so untroubled, that it seemed
that every word pronounced loudly on our
deck wotdd penetrate to the very heart of
that infinite mystery born from the con-
junction of water and sky. We did not
raise our voices. "A water-logged derelict,
I think, sir," said the second officer, quietly,
coming down from aloft with the binoculars
in their case slung across his shoulders ; and
oiur captain, without a word, signed to the
helmsman to steer for the black speck.
Presently we made out a low, jagged stump
sticking up forward — all that remained of
her departed masts.

The captain was expatiating in a low, con-
versational tone to the chief mate upon the
danger of these derelicts, and upon his
dread of coming upon them at night, when
suddenly a man forward screamed out,
"There's people on board of her, sir! I see
them!" in a most extraordinary voice — a
voice never heard before in our ship; the
amazing voice of a stranger. It gave the
232

Initiation

signal for a sudden tumult of shouts. The
watch below ran up the forecastle head in a
body, the cook dashed out of the galley.
Everybody saw the poor fellows now. They
were there! And all at once our ship, which
had the well-earned name of being without
a rival for speed in light winds, seemed to
us to have lost the power of motion, as if
the sea, becoming viscous, had clung to
her sides. And yet she moved. Immensity,
the inseparable companion of a ship's life,
chose that day to breathe upon her as gently
as a sleeping child. The clamor of our ex-
citement had died out, and our living ship,
famous for never losing steerage way as long
as there was air enough to float a feather,
stole, without a ripple, silent and white as a
ghost, towards her mutilated and wounded
sister, come upon at the point of death in
the sunlit haze of a calm day at sea.

With the binoculars glued to his eyes, the
captain said in a quavering tone: "They are
waving to us with something aft there."
He put down the glasses on the skylight
brusquely, and began to walk about the
poop. "A shirt or a flag," he ejaculated,
i>33

The Mirror of the Sea

irritably. "Can't make it out. . . . Some
damn rag or other!" He took a few more
turns on the poop, glancing down over the
rail now and then to see how fast we were
moving. His nervous footsteps fang sharp-
ly in ithe quiet of the ship, where the other
men, all looking the same way, had forgotten
themselves in a staring immobility. "This
will never do!" he cried out, suddenly.
"Lower the boats at once! Down with
themi" '

Before I jumped into mine he took me
aside, as being an inexperienced junior, for
a word of warning.

"You look out as you come alongside
that she doesn't take you down with her.
You understand?"

He murmtired this confidentially^ so that
none of the men at the falls should overhear,
and I was shocked. "Heavens! as if in
such an emergency one stopped to think of
danger!" I exclaimed to myself mentally, in
scorn of such cold-blooded caution.

It takes many lessons to make a real
seaman, and I got my rebuke at once.
My ' experienced commander seemed in one
234

Initiation

searching glance to read my thotlghts on
my ingenuous face.

"What you're going for is to save life, not
to drown your boat's crew for nothing," he
growled severely in my ear. But as we
shoved off he leaned over and cried out:
"It all rests on the power of your arms,
men. Give way for life!"

We made a race of it, and I would never
have believed that a conmion boat's crew of
a merchantman could keep up so much de-
termined fierceness in the regular swing of
their stroke. What our captain had clearly
perceived before we left had become plain to
all of us since. The issue of our enterprise
hung on a hair above that abyss of waters
which will not give up its dead till the Day
of Judgment. It was a race of two ship's
boats matched against Death for a prize of
nine men's lives, and Death had a long start.
We saw the crew of the brig from afar
working at the pumps — still pumping on
that wreck, which already had settled so
far down that the gentle, low swell, over
which our boats rose and fell easily without
a check to their sf)eed, welling up almost

»6 23 s

The Mirror of the Sea

level with her head-rails, plucked at the
ends of broken gear swinging desolately un-
der her naked bowsprit.

We could not, in all conscience, have
picked out a better day for our regatta had
we had the free choice of all the days that
ever dawned upon the lonely struggles and
solitary agonies of ships since the Norse
rovers first steered to the westward against
the run of Atlantic waves. It was a very
good race. At the finish there was not an
oar's -length between the first and second
boat, with Death coming in a good third on
the top of the very next smooth swell, for
all one knew to the contrary. The scuppers
of the brig gurgled softly all together when
the water rising against her sides subsided
sleepily with a low wash, as if playing about
an immovable rock. Her bulwarks were
gone fore-and-aft, and one saw her bare
deck low-lying like a raft and swept clean
of boats, spars, houses— of everything ex-
cept the ring-bolts and the heads of the
pumps. I had one dismal glimpse of it as
I braced myself up to receive upon my
breast the last man to leave her, the
236

Initiation

captain, who literally let himself fall into
my arms.

It had been a weirdly silent rescue — a
rescue without a hail, without a single ut-
tered word, without a gesture or a sign,
without a conscious exchange of glances.
Up to the very last moment those on board
stuck to their pumps, which spouted two
clear streams of water upon their bare feet.
Their brown skin showed through the rents
of their shirts ; and the two small bunches oi
half-naked, tattered men went on bowing
from the waist to one another in their back-
breaking labor, up and down, absorbed,
with no time for a glance over the shoulder
at the help that was coming to them. As
we dashed, unregarded, alongside, a voice let
out one, only one hoarse howl of command,
and then, just as they stood, without caps,
with the salt drying gray in the wrinkles
and folds of their hairy, haggard faces,
blinking stupidly at us their red eyelids,
they made a bolt away from the handles,
tottering and jostling against one another,
and positively flung themselves over upon
our very heads. The clatter they made
237

The Mirror of the Sea

ttuttblitig into the boats had an extraordi-
narily destructive effect upon the illusion of
tragic dignity our self-esteem had thrown
over the contests of mankind with the sea.
On that exquisite day of gently breathing
peace and veiled sunshine perished my ro-
mantic love to what men's imagination had
proclaimed the most august aspect of nat-^
ure. The cynical indifference of the sea to
the merits of human suffering and courage,
laid bare in this ridiculous, panic-tainted
performance extorted from the dire ex-
tremity of nine good and honorable seamen,
revolted me. I saw the duplicity of the
sea's most tender mood. It was so becaiise
it could not help itself, but the awed respect
of the early days was gone. I felt ready to
smile bitterly at its enchanting charm and
glare viciously at its furies. In a moment,
before we shoved off, I had looked coolly at
the life of my choice. Its illusions were
gone, but its fascinations remained. I had
become a seaman at last.

We pulled hard for a quarter of an hoUr,
then laid on our oars waiting for our ship.
She was coming down on us with swelling
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Initiation

sails, looking delicately tall and exquisitely
noble through the mist. The captain of the
brig, who sat in the stem-sheets by my side
with his face in his hands, raised his head
and began to speak with a sort of sombre
volubility. They had lost their masts and
sprung a leak in a hurricane; drifted for
weeks, always at the pumps, met more bad
weather; the ships they sighted failed to
make them out, the 'leak gained upon them
slowly, and the seas had left them nothing
to make a raft of. It was very hard to see
ship after ship pass by at a distance, "as if
everybody had agreed that we must be left
to drown," he added. But they went on
trying to keep the brig afloat as long as pos-
sible, and working the pumps constantly on
insufficient food, mostly raw, till "yesterday
evening," he continued, monotonously, "just
as the sun went down, the men's hearts
broke."

He made an almost imperceptible pause
here, and went on again with exactly the
same intonation:

"They told me the brig could not be
saved, and they thought they bad done
239

The Mirror of the Sea

enough for themselves. I said nothing to
that. It was true. It was no mutiny. I
had nothing to say to them. They lay
about aft all night, as still as so many dead
men. I did not lie down. I kept a look-
out. When the first light came I saw your
ship at once. I waited for more light; the
breeze began to fail on my face. Then I
shouted out as loud as I was able, "Look at
that ship!" but only two men got up very
slowly and came to me. At first only we
three stood alone, for a long time, watching
you coming down to us, and feeling the
breeze drop to a calm almost; but after-
wards others, too, rose, one after another,
and by-and-by I had all hiy crew behind me.
I turned round and said to them that they
could see the ship was coming our way, but
in this small breeze she might come too late
after all, tmless we turned to and tried to
keep the brig afloat long enough to give you
time to save us all. I spoke like that to
them, and then I gave the command to man
the pumps."

He gave the command, and gave the ex-
ample, too, by going himself to the handles,
240

Initiation

but it seems that these men did actually
hang back for a moment, looking at one
another dubiously before they followed him,
"He! he! he!" He broke out into a most
unexpected, imbecile, pathetic, nervous little
giggle. "Their hearts were broken so! They
had been played with top long," he explain-
ed apologetically, lowering his eyes, and be-
came silent.

Twenty - five years is a long time — a
quarter of a century is a dim and distant
past; but to this day I remember the dark-
brown feet, hands, and faces of two of these
men whose hearts had been broken by the
sea. They were lying very still on their
sides on the bottom boards between the
thwarts, curled up like dogs. My boat's
crew, leaning over the looms of their oars,
stared and listened as if at the play. The
master of the brig looked up suddenly to
ask me what day it. was.

They had lost the date. When I told
him it was Sunday, the 2 2d, he frowned,
making some mental calculation, then nod-
ded twice sadly to himself, staring at noth-
ing.

241

The Mirror of the Sea

His aspect was miserably unkempt and
wildly sorrowful. Had it not been for the
unquenchable candor of his blue eyes, whose
unhappy, tired glance every moment sought
his abandoned, sinking brig, as if it could
find rest nowhere else, he would have ap-
peared mad. But he was too simple to go
mad, too simple with that manly simplicity
which alone can bear men unscathed in
mind and body through an encounter with
the deadly playfulness of the sea or with its
less abominable fury.

Neither angry nor playful nor smiling, it
enveloped our distant ship growing bigger
as she neared us, our boats with the rescued
men and the dismantled htill of the brig we
were leaving behind, in the large and placid
embrace of its quietness, half-lost in the fair
haze, as if in a dream of infinite and faithful
clemency. There was no frown, no wrinkle
on its face, not a ripple. And the run of
the slight swell was so smooth that it re-
sembled the graceful undulation of a piece
of shimmering gray silk shot with tender
green. We pulled an easy stroke; but
when the master of the brig, after a glance
342

Initiation

over his shoulder^ stood up with a low ex-
clamation, my men feathered their oars in-
stinctively, without an order, and the boat
lost her way.

He was steadying himself on my shotdder
with a strong grip, while his other arm, flung
up rigidly, pointed a denunciatory firiger at
the iirjmense tranqtiillity of the ocean. After
bis fir^t exclamation, which stopped the
swing of our oars, he made no sound, but
his whole attitude seemed to cry out an in-
dignant "Behold!" ... I could not imagine
what vision of evil had come to him. I was
startled, and the amazing energy of his
immobilized gesture made my heart beat
faster with the anticipation of something
monstrous and unsuspected. The stillness
around us became crushing.

For a moment the succession of silky un-
dulations ran on innocently. I saw each of
them swell up the misty line of the horizon,
far, far away beyond the derelict brig, and
the next moment, with a slight, friendly toss
of our boat, it had passed under us and was
gone. The Mling cadence of the rise and
fall, the invariable gentleness of this irre-
843

The Mirror of the Sea

sistible force, the great charm of the deep
waters, warmed my breast deliciously, like
the subtle poison of a love-potion. But all
this lasted only a few soothing seconds be-
fore I jumped up, too, making the boat roll
like the veriest landlubber.

Something startling, mysterious, hastily
confused, was taking place. I watched it
with incredulous and fascinated awe, as
one watches the confused, swift movements
of some deed of violence done in the dark.
As if at a given signal, the run of the
smooth undulations seemed checked sudden-
ly around the brig. By a strange optical de-
lusion the whole sea appeared to 'rise upon
her in one overwhelming heave of its silky
surface, where in one spot a smother of
foam broke out ferociously. And then the
effort subsided. It was all over, and the
smooth swell .ran on as before from the
horizon in uninterrupted cadence of motion,
passing under us with a slight, friendly toss
of otir boat. Far away, where the brig had
been, an angry white stain undulating on
the surface of steely-gray waters, shot with
gleams of green, diminished swiftly, without
244

Initiation

a hiss, like a patch of pure snow melting in
the sun. And the great stillness after this
initiation into the sea's implacable hate
seemed fiill of dread thoughts and shadows
of disaster.

"Gone!" ejaculated from the depths of
his chest my bowman in a final tone. He
spal/in his hands, and took a better grip on
his/ oar. The captain of the bri^ lowered
his rigid arm slowly, and looked at our faces
in a solemnly conscious silence, which called
upon\us to share in his simple-minded, mar-
velling awe. All at once he sat down by
my side, and leaned forward earnestly at
my boat's crew, who, swinging together in a
long, easy stroke, kept their eyes fixed upon
him faithfully.

"No ship could have done so well," he
addressed them firmly, after a moment of
strained silence, during which he seemed
with trembling lips to seek for words fit to
bear such high testimony. " She was small,
but she was good. I had no anxiety. She
was strong. Last voyage I had my wife
and two children in her. No other ship
could have stood so long the weather she
245

The Mirror of the Sea

had to live through for days and days be-
fore we got dismasted a fortnight ago. She
was fairly worn out, and that's all. You
may believe me. She lasted under us for
days and days, but she could not last for-
ever. It was long enough. I am glad it is
over. No better ship was ever left to sink
at sea on such a day as this."

He was competent to pronounce the fu-
nereal oration of a ship, this son of ancient
sea-folk, whose national existence, so little
stained by the excesses of manly virtues,
had demanded nothing but the merest foot-
hold from the earth. By the merits of his
sea-wise forefathers and by the artlessness
of his heart, he was made fit to deliver
this excellent discourse. There was nothing
wanting in its orderly arrangement — neither
piety nor faith, nor the tribute of praise due
to the worthy dead, with the edifj^ng re-
cital of their achievement. She had lived,
he had loved her; she had suffered, and he
was glad she was at rest. It was an excel-
lent discourse. And it was orthodox, too,
in its fidelity to the cardinal article of a sea-
man's faith, of which it was a single-minded
246

Initiation

confession. "Ships are all right." They
are. They who live with the sea have got
to hold by that creed first and last ; and it
came to me, as I glanced at him sideways,
that some men were not altogether un-
worthy in honor and conscience to pro-
nounce the funereal eulogium of a ship's
constancy in life and death.

After this, sitting by my side with his
loosely clasped hands hanging between his
knees, he uttered no Word, made no move-
ment till the shadow of our ship's sails fell
on the boat, when, at the loud cheer greeting
the return of the victors with their prize, he
lifted up his troubled face with a faint smile
of pathetic indulgence. This smile of the
worthy descendant of the most ancient sea-
folk whose audacity and hardihood had left
no trace of greatness and glory upon the
waters, completed the cycle of my initiation.
There was an infinite depth of hereditary
wisdom in its pitying sadness. It made the
hearty btirsts of cheering sound like a child-
ish noise of triumph. Our crew shouted
with immense confidence — ^honest souls! As
if anybody could ever make sure of having
247

The Mirror of the Sea

prevailed against the sea, which has be-
trayed so many ships of great "name," so
many proud men, so many towering ambi-
tions of fame, power, wealth, greatness!

As I brought the boat under the falls my
captain, in high good -humor, leaned over,
spreading his red and freckled elbows on
the rail, and called down to me sarcastically,
out of the depths of his cynic philosopher's
beard:

" So you have brought the boat back after
all, have you?"

Sarcasm was "his way," and the most
that can be said for it is that it was natural.
This did not make it lovable. But it is de-
corous and expedient to fall in with one's
commander's way. "Yes. I brought the
boat back all right, sir," I answered. And
the good man believed me. It was not for
him to discern upon me the marks of my
recent initiation. And yet I was not ex-
actly the same youngster who had taken
the boat away — all impatience for a race
against Death, with the prize of nine men's
lives at the end.

Already I looked with other eyes upon
248

Initiation

the sea. I knew it capable of betraying the
generous ardor of youth as implacably as,
indifferent to evil and good, it would have
betrayed the basest greed or the noblest
heroism. My conception of its magnani-
mous greatness was gone. And I looked
upon the true sea — ^the sea that plays with
men till their hearts are broken, and wears
stout ships to death. Nothing can touch
the brooding bitterness of its heart. Open
to all and f aithful_ta. none, it exercises its
fascination for the undoing of the best. To
love it is not well. It knows no bond of
plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to
long companionship, to long devotion. The
promise it holds out perpetually is very
great; but the only secret of its possession
is strength, strength — the jealous, sleepless
strength of a man guarding a coveted treas-
ure within his gates.

The Nursery of the Craft

?HE cradle of over - sea traffic
and of the art of naval com-
bats, the Mediterranean, apart
from all the associations of ad-
I venture and glory, the commoii
heritage of all mankind, makes a tender ap-
peal to a seaman. It has sheltered the in-
fancy of his craft. He looks upon it as a
man may look at a vast nursery in an old^
old mansion where innumerable generations
of his own people have learned to walk. I
say his own people because, in a sense, all
sailors belong to one family: all are de-
scended from that adventurous and shaggy
ancestor who, bestriding a shapeless log and
paddling with a crooked branch, accom-
plished the first coasting-trip in a sheltered
bay ringing with the admiring howls of his
tribe. It is a matter of regret that all those
250

The Nursery of the Craft

brothers in craft and feeling, whose genera-
tions have learned to walk a ship's deck in
that nursery, have been also more than once
fiercely engaged in cutting one another'^
throats there. But life, apparently, has
such exigencies. Without human propensity
to murder and other sorts of unrighteousness
there would have been no historical heroism,
It is a consoling reflection. And then, if one
examines impartially the deeds of violence,
they appear of but small consequence.
From Salamis tp Actium, through JLepanto
and the Nile to the naval massacre of
Navarino, not to mention pther armed en-
cotmters of lesser interest, all the blood he-
roically spilled into the Mefiiterranean has
not stained with a single trail of purple the
deep azure of its classic waters.

Of course, it may be argued that battle^
have shaped the destiny of mankind. The
question whether they have shaped it well
would remain open, however, But it would
be hardly worth discussing. It is very
probable that, h^d the battle of Salami?
never been fought, the face of the world
would have been much as we behold it now,
17 251

The Mirror of the Sea

fashioned by the mediocre inspiration and
"^e short-sighted labors of men. From a
long and miserable experience of suffering,
injustice, disgrace and aggression the nations
of the earth are mostly swayed by fear —
fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory
turns easily to rage, hate, and violence. In-
nocent, guileless fear has been the cause of
many wars. Not, of course, the fear of war
itself, which, in the evolution of sentiments
and ideas, has come to be regarded at last
as a half -mystic and glorious ceremony with
certain fashionable rites and preliminary in-
cantations, wherein the conception of its
true natura has been lost. To apprehend
the true aspect, force, and morality of war
as a natural function of mankind one re-
quires a feather in the hair and a ring in the
nose, or, better still, teeth filed to a point
and a tattooed breast. Unfortunately, a
return to such simple ornamentation is im-
possible. We are bound to the chariot of
progress. There is no going back; and, as
bad luck would have it, our civilization,
which has done so much for the comfort
and adornment of our bodies and the eleva-
252

The Nursery of the Craft

tion of our minds, has made lawful killing
frightfully and needlessly expensive.

The whole question of improved arma-
ments has been approached by the govern-
ments of the earth in a spirit of nervous and
unreflecting haste, whereas the right way
was lying plainly before them, and had only
to be pursued with caha! determination.
The learned vigils and labors of a certain
class of inventors should have been rewarded
with honorable liberality as justice demand-
ed; and the bodies of the inventors should
have been blown to pieces by means of their
own perfected explosives and improved
weapons with extreme publicity as the com-
monest prudence dictated. By this meth-
od the ardor of research in that direction
would have been restrained without in-
fringing the sacred privileges of science.
For the lack of a little cool thinking in our
guides and masters this cotirse has not been
followed, and a beautiful simplicity has
been sacrificed for no real advantage. A
frugal mind cannot defend itself from con-
siderable bitterness when reflecting that at
the battle of Actium (which was fought for
253

The Mirror of the Sea

no less a stake than the dominion of the
world) the fleet of Octavianus C^sar and
the fleet of Antonius, including the Egyptian
division and Cleopatra's galley with purple
sails, probably cost less than two modern
battle-ships, or, as the modern naval book-
jargon has it, two naval units. But no
amount of lubberly book-jargon can disguise
a fact well calculated to afflict the soul of
every sound economist. It is not likely
that the Mediterranean will ever behold a
battle with a greater issue; but when the
time comes for another historical fight its
bottom will be enriched as never before by
a quantity of jagged scrap-iron, paid for at
pretty nearly its weight of gold by the de-
luded populations inhabiting the isles and
continents of this planet.

Happy he who, like Ulysses, has made an
adventtu-ous voyage; and there is no such
sea for adventurous voyages as the Mediter-
ranean — ^the inland sea which the ancients
looked upon as so vast and so full of won-
2S4

The Nursery of the Craft

ders. And, indeed, it was terrible and
wonderful; for it is we alone who, swayed
by the audacity of our minds and the
tremors of otir hearts, are the sole arti-
sans of all the wonder and romance of the
world.

It was for the Meditefranean sailors that
fair - haired sifens sang among the black
rocks seething in white foam and mysterious
voices spoke in the darkness above the
moving wave — ^voices menacing, seductive,
or prophetic, like that voice heard at the
beginning of the Christian era by the master
of an African vessel in the Gulf of Syrta,
whose calm nights are full of strange mur-
murs and flitting shadows. It called him
by name, bidding him go and tell all men
that the great god Pan was dead. But the
great legend of the Mediterranean, the
legend of traditional song and grave history,
lives, fascinating and immortal, in our
minds.

The dark and fearful sea of the subtle

Ulysses's wanderings, agitated by the wrath

of OljTthpian gods, harboring on its isles the

fuly of strange monsters and the wiles of

255

The Mirror of the Sea

strange women; the highway of heroes and
sages, of warriors, pirates, and saints; the
workaday sea of Carthaginian merchants
and the pleasure-lake of the Roman Caesars,
claims the veneration of every seaman as
the historical home of that spirit of open
defiance against the great waters of the
earth which is the very sotd of his calling.
Issuing thence to the west and south, as a
youth leaves the shelter of his parental
house, this spirit found the way to the In-
dies, discovered the coasts of a new con-
tinent, and traversed at last the immensity
of the great Pacific, rich in groups of islands
remote and mysterious, like the constella-
tions of the sky.

The first impulse of navigation took its
-visible form in that tideless basin freed
from hidden shoals and treacherous cur-
rents, as if in tender regard for the infancy
of the art. The steep shores of the Mediter-
ranean favored the beginners in one of hu-
manity's most daring enterprises, and the
enchanting inland sea of classic adventure
has led mankind gently from headland to
headland, from bay to bay, from island to
256

The Nursery of the Craft

island, out into the promise of world-wide
oceans beyond the Pillars of Hercules,

The charm of the Mediterranean dwells in
the unforgettable flavor of my early days,
and to this hour this sea, upon which the
Romans alone ruled without dispute, has
kept for me the fascination of youthful ro-
mance. The very first Christmas night I
ever spent away from land was employed in
running before a Gulf of Lyons gale, which
made the old ship groan in every timber as
she skipped before it over the short seas un-
til we brought her to, battered and out of
breath, under the lee of Majorca, where the
smooth water was torn by fierce cat's-paws
under a very stormy sky.

We — or, rather, they, for I had hardly
had two glimpses of salt-water in my life till
then — kept her standing off and on all that
day, while I listened for the first time with
the curiosity of my tender years to the song
of the wind in a ship's rigging. The mo-
notonous and vibrating note was destined
257

The Mirror of the Sed

to grow into the intimacy of the heart, pass
into blood and bonej accompany the thoughts
and acts of two full decades, remain to
haunt like a reproach the peace of the quiet
fireside, and enter into the very texture of
rfespectable dreams dteanied safely under a
roof of rafters and tiles. The wind was
fair, but that day we ran no more.

The thiilg (I will not call her a ship twicfe
in the same half -hour) leaked. She leaked
fully, generously, oVerflowingly, all over-
like a basket. I took an enthusiastic part
in the excitement caUsed by that last in-
firmity of noble ships, without concerning
myself much with the why or the wherefore.
The surmise of my maturer years is that,
bored by her interminable lifCj the vener-
able antiquity was simply yawning with
ennui at every seam. But at the time I did
not know; I knew generally very little, and
least of all What I was doing in that gal^i^e.

I remember that, exactly as in the Comedy
of Molifercj my uncle asked the precise
question in the very words — not of riiy con-
fidential valet, however, but across great
distances of landy in a letter whose mocking
258

The Nursery of the Craft

but indulgent turn ill concealed his almost
paternal anxiety. I fancy I tried to convey
to hiiii my (utterly tmfounded) impression
that the West Indies awaited my coming.
I had to go there. It was a sort of mystic
conviction — something in the nature of a
call. But it was difficult to state intelli-
gibly the grounds of this belief to that man
of rigorous logicj if of liifinite charity.

The truth must have beerl that, all un-
versed in the arts of the wily Greek, the de-
ceiver of gods, the lover of strange women,
the evoker of blood - thirsty shades, I yet
longed for the begintiing of niy own obscure
"Odyssey," which, as wag proper for a
modern, should unroll its wonders and ter-
rors beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The
disdainful ocean did not open wide to swal-
low up my audacityj though the ship, the
ridiculous and ancient galire of my folly,
the old, weary, disenchanted sugar-wagon,
seemed extremely disposed to open out and
swallow up as much salt-water as she could
hold. This, if less grandiose, would have
been as final a catastrophe.

But no catastrophe occurred. I live4 to
259

The Mirror of the Sea

watch on a strange shore a black and youth-
ful Nausicaa, with a joyous train of at-
tendant maidens, carrying baskets of linen
to a clear stream overhung by the heads of
slender palm-trees. The vivid colors of
their draped raiment and the gold of their
ear-rings invested with a barbaric and re-
gal magnificence their figures, stepping out
freely in a shower of broken sunshine. The
whiteness of their teeth was still more daz-
zling than the splendor of jewels at their
ears. The shaded side of the ravine gleamed
with their smiles. They were as unabashed
as so many princesses, but, alas! not one of
them was the daughter of a jet-black sover-
eign. Such was my abominable luck in be-
ing born by a mere hair-breadth of twenty-
five centuries too late into a world where
kings have been growing scarce with scan-
dalous rapidity, while the few who remain
have adopted the uninteresting manners
and customs of simple millionaires. Obvi-
ously, it was a vain hope in 187- to see the
ladies of a royal household walk in checkered
sunshine, with baskets of linen on their
heads, to the banks of a clear stream over-
260

The Nursery of the Craft

hung by the starry fronds of palm-trees. It
was a vain hope. If I did not ask myself
whether, limited by such discouraging im-
possibilities, life were still worth living, it
was only because I had then before me sev-
eral other pressing questions, some of which
have remained unanswered to this day.
The resonant, laughing voices of these gor-
geous maidens scared away the multitude
of humming-birds, whose delicate wings
wreathed with the mist of their vibration
the tops of flowering bushes.

No, they were not princesses. Their un-
restrained laughter filling the hot, fern-clad
ravine had a soulless limpidity, as of wild,
inhuman dwellers in tropical woodlands.
Following the example of certain prudent
travellers, I withdrew unseen — and returned,
not much wiser, to the Mediterranean, the
sea of classic adventures.

The "Tremolino'*

^T was written that there, in the
liiirsery of our navigating an-
cestors, I should learn to walk
in the ways of my ctaiH and
grow in the love of the sea,
blind as young love often is, but absorbing
dhd disintetested as a,ll true love must be.
I demanded nothing from it — not even ad-
venture. In this I showed, perhaps, more
intuitive wisdom than high self-denial. No
adventure ever came to one for the asking.
He who starts on a deUberate quest of ad-
venture goes forth but to gather dead-sea
fruit, unless, indeed, he be beloved of the
gods and great among heroes, like that most
excellent cavalier Don Quixote de la Mancha.
By us ordinary mortals of a mediocre animus
that is only too anxious to pass by wicked
giants for so many honest windmills, ad-
?6i

The ''Tremolino"

«

ventures are entertained like visiting angels.
They come upon our eomplaeency unawares.
As unbidden guests are apt to do, they often
come at inconvenient times. And we are
glad to let them go unrecognized, without
any acknowledgment of so high a favor.
After many years, on looking back from the
middle ttirn of life's way at the events of the
past, which, like a friendly crowd, seem to
look sadly after us hastening towards the
Cimmerian shore, we may see here and
there, in the gray throng, some figure glow-
ing with a faint radiance, as though it had
caught all the light of our already crepuscu-
lar sky. And by this glow we may recognize
the faces of our true adventures, of the once
unbidden guests entertained unawares in
our young days.

If the Mediterranean, the venerable (and
sometimes atrociously ill - tempered) nurse
of all navigators, was to rock my youth,
the providing of the cradle necessary for
that operation was intrusted by fate to the
most casual assemblage of irresponsible
young men (all, however, older than my-
self) that, as if drunk with Provengal sun-
263

Thef Mirror of the Sea

shine, frittered life away in joyous levity on
the model of Balzac's Histoire des Treize
qualified by a dash of romance de cape et
d'SpSe.

She who was my cradle in those years
hadbeen btiilt on the river of Savona by
a famous builder of boats, was rigged in
Corsica by another good man, and was de-
scribed on her papers as a "tartane" of
sixty tons. In reality, she was a true
balancelle, with two short masts raking for-
ward and two curved yards, each as long as
her hull ; a true child of the Latin lake, with
a spread of two enormous sails resembling
the pointed wings on a sea-bird's slender
body, and herself, like a bird indeed, skim-
ming rather than sailing the seas.

Her name was the Tremolino. How is
this to be translated ? The Quiver erf What
a name to give the pluckiest little craft that
ever dipped her sides in angry foam! I had
felt her, it is true, trembling for nights and
days together under my feet, but it was
with the high-strung tenseness of her faith-
ful courage. In her short but brilliant
career she has taught me nothing, but she
264

The "Tremolino"

has given me everything. I owe to her the
awakened love for the sea that, with the
quivering of her swift little body and the
humming of the wind under the foot of her
lateen sails, stole into my heart with a sort
of gentle violence, and brought my imagina-
tion under its despotic sway. The Tremo-
Uno! To this day I cannot utter or even
write that name without a strange tighten-
ing of the breast and the gasp of mingled^
delight and dread of one's first passionate
experience.

We four formed (to use a term well un-
derstood nowadays in every social sphere) a
"syndicate" owning the Tremolino: a cos-
mopolitan and astonishing syndicate. And
we were aU ardent Royalists of the snow-
white Legitimist complexion — Heaven only
knows why! In aU associations of men
there is generally one who, by the authority
of age and of a more experienced wisdom,
imparts a collective character to the whole
set. If I mention that the oldest of us was
26s

The Mirror of the Sea

very old, extremely old-^nearly thirty years
old— and that he used to declare with gal-
lant carelessness, "I live by my sword," I
think I have given enough infomtjation on
the score of our collective wisdom. He was
a North Carolinian gentleman, J. M. K. B.
were the initials of his name, and he really
did live by the sword, as far as I know. Ha
died by it, too, later on, in a Balkanian
squabble, in the cause of some Serbs or else
Bulgarians, who were neither Catholics nor
gentlemen — at least, not in the exalted
but narrow sense he attached to that last
word.

Poor J. M. K. B., AmSricain, Catholique,
et gentilhomme, as he was disposed to de-
scribe himseK in moments of lofty expan^
sion! Are there stiU to be found in Europe
gentlemen keen of face and elegantly slight
of body, of distingtiished aspect, with a fas-
cinating drawing-room manner and with a
dark, fatal glance, who live by their swords,
I wonder? His family had been ruined in
the Civil War, I fancy, and seems for a dec-
ade or so to have led a wandering life in

the Old World. As to Henry C , the

266

The "Tremolino"

next in age and wisdom of our band, he had
broken loose from the unyielding rigidity of
his family, solidly footed, if I remember
rightly, in a well-to-do London suburb.
On their respectable authority he intro-
duced himself meekly to strangers as a
"black sheep." I have never seen a more
guileless specimen of an outcast. Never.

However, his people had the grace to send
him a httle money now and then. Enam-
ored of the south, of Provenge, of its peo-
ple, its life, its sunshine and its poetry, nar-
row-chested, tall, and short-sighted, he strode
along the streets and the lanes, his long feet
projecting far in advance of his body, and
his white nose and gingery mustache buried
in an open book: for he had the habit of
reading as he w^alked. How he avoided fall-
ing into precipices, off the quays, or down
staircases is a great mystery. The sides of
his overcoat bulged out with pocket-editions
of various poets. When not engaged in
reading Virgil, Homer, or Mistral, in parks,
restaurants, streets, and suchlike public
places, he indited sonnets (in French) to the
eyes, ears, chin, hair, and other visible pef-
i8 267

The Mirror of the Sea

fections of a nymph called Thirfese, the
daughter, truth compels me to state, of a
certain Madame Leonore who kept a small
caf^ for sailors in one of the narrowest
streets of the old town.

No more charming face, clear-cut like an
antique gem, and delicate in coloring like
the petal of a flower, had ever been set on,
alas! a somewhat squat body. He read his
verses aloud to her in the very caf6 with
the innocence of a little child and the vanity
of a poet. We followed him there willingly
enough, if only to watch the divine Therfese
laugh, under the vigilant black eyes of
Madame Leonore, her mother. She laughed
very prettily, not so much at the sonnets,
which she could not but esteem, as at poor
Henry's French accent, which was unique,
resembling the warbling of birds, if birds
ever warbled with a stuttering, nasal in-
tonation.

Our third partner was Roger P. de la

S , the most Scandinavian-looking of

Provencal squires, fair, and six feet high, as
became a descendant of sea-roving North-
men, authoritative, incisive, wittily scom-
268

The "Tremolino"

ful, with a comedy in three acts in his
pocket, and in his breast a heart blighted by
a hopeless passion for his beautiful cousin,
married to a wealthy hide and tallow mer-
chant. He used to take us to lunch at their
house without ceremony. I admired the
good lady's sweet patience. The husband
was a conciliatory soul, with a great fund of
resignation, which he expended on "Roger's
friends." I suspect he was secretly horrified
at these invasions. But it was a Carlist
salon, and as such we were made welcome.
The possibility of raising Catalonia in the
interest of the Rey netto, who had just then
crossed the Pyrenees, was much discussed
there.

Don Carlos, no doubt, must have had
many queer friends (it is the common lot of
all pretenders), but among them none more
extravagantly fantastic than the Tremolino
Syndicate, which used to meet in a tavern
on the quays of the old port. The antique
city of Massilia had surely never, since the
days of the earliest Phoenicians, known an
odder set of ship-owners. We met to dis-
cuss and settle the plan of operations for
269

The Mirror of the Sea

each voyage of thei TremoUno. In these
operations a banking-house, too, was con-
cerned — a very respectable banking-house.
But I atti afraid I shall end by saying too
much. Ladies, too, were concerned (I am
really afraid I am saying too rnuch) — all
sorts of ladies, some old enough to know
better than to put their trust in princes>
others young and full of illusions.

One of these last was extremely amusing
in the imitations she gave us, in confidence^
of various highly placed personages she was
perpetually rushing off to Paris to interview
in the interests of the cause — Por el Rey!
For she Was a Carlist, and of Basque blood
at that, with something of a lioness in the
expression of her courageous face (especially
when she let her hair down), and with the
volatile little soul of a sparrow dressed in
fine Parisian feathers, which had the trick
of coming off disconcertingly at unexpected
moments.

But her imitations of a Parisian person-
age, very highly placedj indeed, as she rep-
resented him standing in the corner 'of a
room with his face to the wall, rubbing the
270

The "Tremoljno"

back of his head and moaning helplessly,
"Rita, you are the death of me," were
enough to make one (if young and free from
cares) split one's sides laughing. She had
an uncle still living, a very effective Carlist,
too, the priest of a little mountain parish in
Guipt^zGoa. As the sea - going memher of
the syndicate (whose plans depended greatly
on Dona Rita's information), I used to be
charged with humbly affectionate messages
for the old man. These messages I was sup^
posed to deliver to the Arragonese muletegrs
(who were sure to await at certain times the
TreynoUno in the neighborhood of the Gulf
of Rosas), for faithful transportation inland,
together with the various unlawful goods
landed secretly from under the Tremolino's
hatches.

Well, now, I have really let out too much
(as I feared I should in the end) as tg the
usual contents of my sea-cradle. But let it
stand. And if anybody remarks cynically
that I must have been a promising infant in
those days, let that stand, too, I am con-
cerned but for the good name of the Tremo-
lino, and I affirm that a ship is ever guilt-
271

The Mirror of the Sea

less of the sins, transgressions, and follies of
her men.

It was not Tremolino's fault that the syn-
dicate depended so much on the wit and
wisdom and the information of Dona Rita.
She had taken a little furnished house on
the Prado for the good of the cause — Por el
Rey! She was always taking little houses
for somebody's good; for the sick or the
sorry, for broken-down artists, cleaned-out
gamblers, temporarily unlucky speculators
-—vieux amis — old friends, as she used to
explain apologetically, with a shrug of her^
fine shoulders.

Whether Don Carlos was one of the "old
friends," too, it's hard to say. More \m-
likely things have been heard of in smoking-
rooms. All I know is that one evening, en-
tering incautiously the salon of the little
house just after the news of a considerable
Carlist success had reached the faithful, I
was seized round the neck and waist and
whirled recklessly three times round the
272

The "Tremolino"

room, to the crash of upsetting furniture
and the humming of a valse tune in a warm,
contralto voice.

When released from the dizzy embrace, I
sat down on the carpet — suddenly, without
affectation. In this unpretentious attitude
I became aware that J. M. K. B. had fol-
lowed me into the room, elegant, fatal, cor-
rect and severe in a white tie and large shirt-
front. In answer to his politely sinister,
prolonged glance of inquiry, I overheard
Dona Rita murmuring, with some confusion
and annoyance, "Vous 6tes bfite mon cher.
Voyons! Cau'aaucime consequence." Well
content in this case to be of no particular
consequence, I had already about me the ele-
ments of some worldly sense.

Rearranging my collar, which, truth to
say, ought to have been a round one above
a short jacket, but was not, I observed,
felicitously, that I had come to say good-
bye, being ready to go off to sea that very
night with the Tremolino. Our hostess,
slightly panting yet, and just a shade di-
shevelled, turned tartly upon J. M. K. B.,
desiring to know when he would be ready to
273

The Mirror of the Sea

go off by the TremoUno, or in any other way,
ia order to join the royal headquarterg.
Did he intend, she asked, ironically, to wait
for the very eve of the entry into Madrid?
Thus by a judicious exercise of tact and as-
perity we .re-established the atmospheric
equilibrium of the room long before I left a
little before midnight, now tenderly recon-
ciled, to walk down to the harbor and hail
the TremoUno by the usual soft whistle from
the edge of the quay. It was our signal,
invariably heard by the ever-watchful Dom-
inic, the padrone.

He would raise a lantern silently to light
my steps along the narrow, springy plank of
our primitive gangway. "And so we are
going off," he would murmur directly my
foot touched the deck. I was the harbinger
of sudden departures, but there was nothing
in the world sudden enough to take Dominic
unawares. His thick black mustaches, curl-
ed every morning with hot tongs by the
barber at the comer of the quay, seemed to
hide a perpetual smile. But nobody, I be-
lieve, had ever seen the true shape of hi§
iips. From the slow, imperturbable gravity
274

The "Tremolino"

of that broad-chested man you would think
he had never smiled in his life. In his eyes
lurked a look of perfectly remorseless irony,
as though he had been provided with an ex-
tremely experienced soul; and the slightest
distension of his nostrils would give to his
bronzed face a look of ejctraordinary bold-
ness. This was the only play of feature of
which he seemed capable, being a southern-
er of a concentrated, deliberate type. His
ebony hair curled sHghtly on the temples.
He may have been forty years old, aod he
was a great voyager on the. inland sea.

Astute and ruthless, he could have rivalled
in resource the unfortunate son of Laertes
and Anticlea. If he did not pit his craft
and audacity against the very gods, it is
only because the Olympian gods are dead.
Certainly no woman could frighten him. A
one-eyed giant would have had not the
ghost of a chance against Porninie CervQni,
of Corsica, iiot Ithaca; and no king, son of
kings, but of very respectable family-^au-
thentic Caporali, he affirmed. But that is
as it niay be. The Caporali families date
back to the twelfth century.
27S

The Mirror of the Sea

For want of more exalted adversaries,
Dominic turned his audacity, fertile in im-
pious stratagems, against the powers of the
earth, as represented by the institution of
custom-houses and every mortal belonging
thereto — scribes, officers, and guardacostas
afloat and ashore. He was the very man
for us, this modern and unlawful wanderer
with his own legend of loves, dangers, and
bloodshed. He told us bits of it sometimes
in measured, ironic tones. He spoke Cata-
lonian, the Italian of Corsica, and the French
of Provenge with the same easy naturalness.
Dressed in shore togs, a white starched shirt,
black jacket, and round hat, as I took him
once to see Dona Rita, he was extremely
presentable. He could make himself in-
teresting by a tactful and rugged reserve set
off by a grim, almost imperceptible, plajrful-
ness of tone and manner. f

He had the physical assurance of strong-
hearted men. After half an hour's inter-
view in the dining-room, during which they
got in touch with each other in an amazing
way, Rita told us in her best grande - dame
manner: "Mais il est parfait, cet homme."
276

The "Tremolino"

He was perfect. On board the TremoUno,
wrapped up in a black caban, the picturesque
cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those
massive mustaches and his remorseless eyes
set oS. by the shadow of the deep hood, he
looked piratical and monkish and darkly
initiated into the most awful mysteries of
the sea.

Anyway, he was perfect, as Dona Rita
had declared. The only thing unsatisfac-
tory (and even inexplicable) about our
Dominic was his nephew Cesar. It was
startling to see a desolate expression of
shame veil the remorseless audacity in the
eyes of that man superior to all scruples and
terrors.

"I would never have dared to bring him
on board your balancelle," he once apolo-
gized to me. " But what am I to do ? His
mother is dead, and my brother has gone
into the bush."

In this way I learned that our Dominic
had a brother. As to "going into the
277

The Mirror of the Sea

bush," this only means that a man has done
his duty successfully in the pursuit of a
hereditary vendetta. The feud which had
existed for ages between the fopiilies of
Cerypni and Brunaschi was so old that it
seemed to have smouldered put at last.
One evening Pietro Brunasphi, after a
laborious day among his olive-trees, sat on
a chair against the wall of his house with a
bowl of broth on his knees and a piece of
bread in his hand. Dominic's brother, go-
ing home with a gtm on his shoulder, foijnd
a sudden offence in this sight of content and
rest so obviously calculated to awaken the
feelings of hatred and revenge. He and
Pietro had never had any personal quarrel;
but, as Dominic explained, "all otir dead
cried out to him." He shouted from be^
hind a wall of stones, "Oh, Pietro! Behold
what is coming!" And as the other looked
Up innocently he took aim at the forehead
and squared the old vendetta account so
neatly that, according to Dominic, the dead
man continued to sit with the bowl of broth
on his knees and the piece of bread in his
hand.

278

The "Tremolino"

This is why — because in Cof sicEl yotir
dead will not leave you alone — Dominic's
brother had to go into the vnaquis, into the
bush on the wild mountain-side, to dodge
the gendarmes for the insignificant remain-
der of his life, and Dominic had charge of
his nephew with a mission to make a man
of him.

No more unpromising undertaking could
be iinagined. The very material for the
task seemed wanting. The Cervonis, if not
handsome men, were good sturdy flesh and
blood. But this extraordinarily lean arid
livid youth seemed to have no more blood
in him than a snail.

"Some cursed witch must have stolen my
brother's child from the cradle and put that
spawn of a starved devil in its place,"
Dominic would say to me. "Look at him!
Just look at him!"

To look at Cesar was not pleasant. His
pafchmeilt skin, showing dead white on his
cranium through the thin wisps of dirty
browri hair, seemed to be glued directly and
tightly upon his big bones. Without being
in any way deformed, he was the nearest ap-
279

The Mirror of the Sea

proach which I have ever seen or could im-
agine to what is commonly tmderstood by
the word "monster." That the source of
the effect produced was really moral I have
no doubt. An utterly, hopelessly depraved
nature was expressed in physical terms, that
taken each separately had nothing posi-
tively startling. You imagined him clam-
mily cold to the touch, like a snake. The
slightest reproof, the most mild and justifi-
<able remonstrance, would be met by a re-
sentful glare and an evil shrinking of his
thin, dry upper lip, a snarl of hate to which
he generally added the agreeable sound of
grinding teeth.

It was for this venomous performance
rather than for his lies, impudence, and
laziness that his uncle used to knock him
down. It must not be imagined that it was
anything in the nature of a brutal assault.
Dominic's brawny arm would be seen de-
scribing deliberately an ample horizontal
gesture, a dignified sweep, and Cesar would
go over suddenly like* a ninepin — ^which was
funny to see. But, once down, he would
writhe on the deck, gnashing his teeth in
280

The "Tremolino"

impotent rage — which was pretty horrible
to behold. And it also happened more than
once that he wotild disappear completely —
which was startling to observe. This is the
exact truth. Before some of these majestic
cuffs Cesar would go down and vanish. He
would vanish heels overhead into open hatch-
ways, into scuttles, behind up-ended casks, ac-
cording to the place where he happened to
come into contact with his uncle's mighty arm.

Once — it was in the old harbor, just
before the Tremolino' s last voyage — he van-
ished thus overboard to my infinite con-
sternation. Dominic and I had been talk-
ing business together aft, and Cesar had
sneaked up behind us to listen, for, among
his other perfections, he was a consummate
eavesdropper and spy. At the sound of the
heavy plop alongside horror held me rooted
to the spot ; but Dominic stepped quietly to
the rail and leaned over, waiting for his
nephew's miserable head to bob up for the
first time.

"Oh6, Cesar!" he yelled, contemptuously,
to the spluttering wretch. "Catch hold of
that mooring hawser — charogne!"
281

The Mirror of the Sea

He apprdached me to resume the inter-
rupted conversation.

"What about Cesar?" I asked, anxiously.

"Canallia! Let him hang there," was his
answer. And he went on talking over the
business in hand calmly, while I tried vainly
to dismiss from my mind the picture of
Cesar steeped to the chin in the water of
the old hait>of , a decoction of centuries of
marine refuse. I tried to dismiss it, be--
cause the mere notion of that liquid made
me feel very sick. Presently Dominic, hail-
ing an idle boatman, directed him to go and
fish his nephew out; and by-and-by Cesar
appeared walking on board from the quay,
shivering, streaming with filthy water, with
bits of rotten straws in his hair and a piece
of dirty orange-peel stranded on his should
der. His teeth chattered; his yellow eyes
squinted balefuUy at us as he passed for-
ward. I thought it my duty to remon-
strate.

"Why are you always knocking him
about, Dominic?" I asked. Indeed, I felt
convinced it was no earthly good^-a sheer
waste of muscular force.
282

The "Tremglinp"

''I must try to make g, man qf hipa,"
Dominic answered, hqpielessly.

I restraineid thp obvious rptort that in
this way he ran the risk of making, in the
words pf the immortal Mr. Mantalini, "a
^enmitipn danip, t}npleasan|; corpse of hirn."

"He wants to he a lockspailth!" b^rst out
Cervoni. "Tq learn how Ito pick locks, I
supppsp," he added, with sardonic bitter-
ness.

"Why not let htm be a locksmith?" I
ventured.

"Whp would teach him?" he cried.
"Where could I leave hini?" hp asked, with
g, drop in his voice; and I had piy first
glimpse of genuine despair. "He steg,ls,
ypu know, ajas! Par la Madonne! I be-
lieve he would put poison in your food an4
mine-rtjie viper!"

He raise)! his face and both his clinched
fists slowly to heaven. However, Cesar
never drppppd poison into our cups. One
earniot be s^re, but I fancy he went to work
in anpther way.

This vpy^ge, of whiph thp de^iails need
nqt be givpn, we had to range fajr afield for

19 283

The Mirror of the Sea

sufficient reasons. Coming up from the
south to end it with the important and
really dangerous part of the scheme in hand,
we found it necessary to look into Barcelona
for certain definite information. This ap-
pears like running one's head into the very
jaws of the Hon, but in reality it was not so.
We had one or two high, influential friends
there, and many others humble but valu-
able because bought for good hard cash.
We were in no danger of being molested; in-
deed, the important information reached us
promptly by the hands of a custom-house
officer, who came on board full of showy
zeal to poke an iron rod into the layer of
oranges which made the visible part of our
cargo in the hatchway. I forgot to men-
tion before that the Tremolino was official-
ly known as a fruit and cork-wood trader.
The zealous officer managed to slip a useful
piece of paper into Dominic's hand as he
went ashore, and a few hours afterwards,
being off duty, he returned on board again
athirst for drinks and gratitude. He got
both as a matter of course. While he sat
sipping his liqueur in the tiny cabin, Dom-
284

The "Tremolino"

inic pKed him with questions as to the
whereabouts of the guardacostas. The. pre-
ventive service afloat was really the one for
us to reckon with, and it was material for
our success and safety to know the exact
position of the patrol-craft in the neighbor-
hood. The news could not have been more
favorable. The ofificer mentioned a small
place on the coast some twelve miles off,
where, unsuspicious and unready, she was
lying at anchor, with her sails unbent, paint-
ing yards and scraping spars. Then he left
us after the usual compliments, smiirking
reassviringly over his shoulder.

I had kept below pretty close all day
from excess of prudence. The stake played
on that trip was big. ^

"We are ready to go at once, but for
Cesar, who has been missing ever since
breakfast," announced Dominic to me in
his slow, grim way.

Where the fellow had gone, and why, we
could not imagine. The usual surmises in
the case of a missing seaman did not apply
to Cesar's absence. He was too odious for
love, friendship, gambling, or even casual
28s

The Mirror of the Sea

intercotirse. But once or twice he had
wandered away like this before.

Dominic went ashore to look for him, but
returned at the end of two hours alone and
very angry, as I could see by the token of
the invisible smile under his mustache be-:
ing intensified. We wondered what had be-
come of the wretch, and made a hurried in-
vestigation among our portable property.
He had stolen nothing.

"He will be back before long," I said,
confidently.

Ten minutes afterwards one of the men
on deck called out, loudly:

"I can see him coming."

Cesar had only his shirt and trousers on.
He had sold his coat, apparently, for pocket-
money.

"You knave!" was all Dominic said, with
a terrible softness of voice. He restrained
his choler for a time. "Where have you
been, vagabond?" he asked, menacingly.

Nothing would induce Cesar to answer
that question. It was as if he even dis-
dained to lie. He faced us, drawing back
his lips and gnashing his teeth, and did not
286

The "Tremolino"

shrink an inch befote the sweep of Dominic's
arm. He went down as if shot, of course.
But this time I noticed that, when picking
himself up, he remained longer than usual
on all fours, baring his big teeth over his
shoulder and glaring upward at his uncle
with a new sort of hate in his round, yellow
eyes.' That permanent sentiment seemed
pointed at that moment by especial malice
and curiosity. I was quite interested. If
he ever manages to put poison in the dishes,
I thought to myself, this is how he will look
at us as we sit at our meal. But I did not,
of course, believe for a moment that he
would ever put poison in our fodd. He ate
the same things himself. Moreovfer, he had
no poison. And I could not imagine a
human being so blinded by cupidity as to
sell poison to such an atrocious creature.

We slipped out to sea quietly at dusk,

and all through the night everything werit

well. The breeze was gusty; a southerly

blow was making up. It was fair wiiid for

287

The Mirror of the Sea

our course. Now and then Dominic slowly
and rhythmically struck his hands togeth-
er a few times, as if applauding the per-
formance of the Tremolino. The balancelle
hummed and quivered as she flew along,
dancing lightly under our feet.

At daybreak I pointed out to Dominic,
among the several sail in view running be-
fore the gathering storm, one particular ves-
sel. The press of canvas she carried made
her loom up high, end-on, like a gray column
standing motionless directly in otir wake.

"Look at this fellow, Dominic," I said.
"He seems to be in a hurry."

The padnMe made no remark, but, wrap-
ping his black cloak close about him, stood
up to look. His weather-tanned face, framed
in the hood, had an aspect of authority and
challenging force, with the deep-set eyes gaz-
ing far away fixedly, without a wink, like
the intent, merciless, steady eyes of a sea-
bird.

"Chi va piano va sano," he remarked at
last, with a derisive glance over the side,
in ironic allusion to our own tremendous
speed.

»88

The "Tremolino"

The Tremolino was doing her best, and
seemed to hardly touch the great burst of
foam over which she darted. I crouched
down again to get some shelter from the
low btdwark. After more than half an hour
of swaying immobility expressing a concen-
trated, breathless watchfulness, Dominic
sank on the deck by my side. Within the
monkish cowl his eyes gleamed with a fierce
expression which surprised me. All he said
was:

"He has come out here to wash the new
paint o£E his yards, I suppose."

"What?" I shouted, getting up on my
knees. Vis she a guardacosta?"

The perpetual suggestion of a smile under
Dominic's piratical mustache seemed to be-
come more accentuated — quite real, grim,
actually almost visible through the wet and
imcurled hair. Judging by that symptom,
he must have been in a towering rage. But
I could also see that he was puzzled, and
that discovery affected me disagreeably.
Dominic puzzled! For a long time, leaning
against the bulwark, I gazed over the stern
at the gray colunm that seemed to stand
289

The Mirror df the Sea

swaying slightly in ottf wake always at the
same distance.

Meanwhile, Dominic, black and cowlfed,
sat cross-legged on the deck, with his back
to the wind, recalling vaguely an Arab chief
in his bttrnuss sitting on the sand. Aboire
his motionless figure the little fcord and
tassel on the stiff point of the hoOd swtttig
about inanfely in the gale. Ai last I gave up
facing the wind and tain, and crOHiched
down by his side. I was satisfied that the
sail was a patrdl- craft. Her presence was
not a thing to talk about, btlt soon, betweeii
two clouds charged with hail - showers, a
burst of stinshine fell upon hfei- sails, arid
otir ttien discovered her character fot- them-
selves. From that moment I noticed thai
they seemed to take no heed of Ortfei Bin other
6r of anything else. They could spdte no
eyes and no thought but for the slight
coltunn - shape astern of us. Its swaying
had become perceptible. For a moment she
reirlained dstzzlingly white, then faded a-Way
slowly to nothing in a squall, only to re-
appear again, nearly black, reseinbling a
|)ost stuck upright against the slaty baqk-

2qo

The "Tremblirto"

ground of solid clbtld. Since fll-st hdticed
she had liot gained on us a foot;

"Shfe will never catch the TreMoUito,*' I
said, exiiltingly.

Dortiinic did hot IbOk at me. He re-
marked, absently, but justly, that the heavy
weatheir was in Our flursuer's favor. She
was threei times Our size. What we had to
do was to kefep Otir diStahce till dark, which
we Could manage easily, and then hatd off to
seaward and Consider the situation. But
his thoughts s^erried io stUmble iti the dark-
ness of some not-solved enigma, and soon he
fell silent. We ran steadily, wing-and-wing.
Cape San Sebastian nearly d.head seemed to
recede frotti us in the squalls of rain, and
come out dgain to meet our rush, every timfe
more distinct between the showers.

For my part I was by no means certain
that this gabeloU (as our men alluded tO her
opprobriously) was after us at all. There
were nautical difficulties in such a -vie^
which inade the express the sanguine opiiriion
that she was iti all ihrlOcCnce sitiiply chang-
iilg her station; At this Dottiinic conde-
scended to turn his head.
391

The Mirror of the Sea

"I tell you she is in chase," he affirmed,
moodily, after one short glance astern.

I never doubted his opinion. But with
all the ardor of a neophyte and the pride of
an apt learner I was at that time a great
nautical casuist.

"What I can't understand," I insisted,
subtly, "is how on earth, with this wind,
she has managed to be just where she was
when we first made her out. It is clear
that she could not, and did not, gain twelve
miles on us during the night. And there
are other impossibilities. ..."

Dominic had been sitting motionless, like
an inanimate black cone posed on the stem-
deck, near the rudder-head, with a smaU
tassel fluttering on its sharp point, and for a
time he preserved the immobility of his
meditation. Then, bending over with a
short laugh, he gave my ear the bitter fruit
of it. He understood everything now per-
fectly. She was where we had seen her first,
not because she had caught us up, but be-
cause we had passed her during the night
while she was already waiting for us, hove-
to, most likely, on our very track.
292

The "Tremolino"

"Do you understand — already?" Dominic
muttered, in a fierce undertone. "Already!
You know we left a good eight hours before
we were expected to leave, otherwise she
would have been in time to lie in wait for
us on the other side of the Cape, and" — he
snapped his teeth like a wolf close to my
face — "and she would have had us like —
that."

I saw it all plainly enough now. They
had eyes in their heads and all their wits
about them in that craft. We had passed
them in the dark as they jogged on easily
towards their ambush with the idea that we
were yet far behind. At daylight, how-
ever, sighting a balancelle ahead under a
press of canvas, they had made sail in chase.
But if that was so, then —

Dominic seized my arm.

"Yes, yes! She came out on an infor-
mation — do you see it? — on information.
, . . We have been sold — ^betrayed. Why?
How ? What for ? We always paid them
all so well on shore. ... No! But it is my
head that is going to burst."

He seemed to choke, tugged at the throat
293

The Mirror of the Sea

button of the cloak, jumped up opien-
moutHed as if to Hurl curses and denuncia-
tioii, but iiistantly mastered himself,' and,
wrapping up the cloak tloser about him, sat
down on the deck again as quiet as ever.

"Yes, it must be the work of some scoun-
drel ashore," I observed.

Hei pulled the edge of the hood well for-
ward over his brow before he muttered:

"A scoundrel. . . . Yes. . . . It's evident."

"Well," i said, "they can't get us, that's
clear."

"No," he assented, quietly, "they caii-
not."

We shaved the Cape very close to avoid
an adverse current. On the other side, by
the effect of the land, the wind failed us so
completely for a moment that the Tremd-
lino's two great lofty sails hung idle to the
masts in the thundering uproar of the seas
breaking upon the shore we had left behind.
And whfen the returning gust filled them
again, we saw with amazement hdlf of the
new main-sail, which we thought fit to drive
the boat under before giving way, absd-
lutely fly out of the bolt-rbpes. We lowered
294

The "Tremolino"

the yard at once, and saved it all, but it
was no longer a sail; it was only a heap of
soaked strips of canvas cumbering the deck
and weighting the craft. Dominic gave the
order to throw the whole lot overboard.

" I wotild have had the yard thrown over-
board, too," he said, leading me aft again,
"if it had not been for the trouble. Let no
sign escape you," he continued, lowering his
voice, "but I am going to tell you some-
thing terrible. Listen: I have observed
that the roping stitches on that sail have
been cut! You hear? Gut with a knife in
many places. And yet it stood all that
time. Not enough cut. That flap did it at
last. What matters it? But look! there's
treachery seated on this very deck. By
the horns of the devil! seated here at our
very backs. Do not turn, signorino."

We were facing aft then.

''What's to be done?" I asked, appalled.

"Nothing. Silence! Be a man, siguo-
nno.

^'Whkt else?" I said.

To show I could be a man, I resolved to
utter no sound as long as Dominic himself
29s

The Mirror of the Sea

had the force to keep his lips closed. Noth-
ing but silence becomes certain situations.
Moreover, the experience of treachery seem-
ed to spread a hopeless drowsiness over my
thoughts and senses. For an hour or more
we watched our pursuer surging out near-
er and nearer from among the squalls that
sometimes hid her altogether. But even
when not seen, we felt her there like a knife
at our throats. She gained on us fright-
ftilly. And the Tremolino, in a fierce breeze
and in much smoother water, swtmg on
easily under her one sail, with something
appallingly careless in the joyous freedom
of her motion. Another half-hotir went by.
I could not stand it any longer.

"They will get the poor barky," I stam-
mered out suddenly, almost on the verge of
tears.

Dominic stirred no more than a carving.
A sense of catastrophic loneliness overcame
my inexperienced soul. The vision. of my
companions passed before me. The whole
Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I
reckoned. And they appeared to me clear-
cut and very small, with affected voices and
296

The "Tremolino"

stiflf gestures, like a procession of rigid mari-
onettes upon a toy stage. I gave a start.
What was this? A mysterious, remorseless
whisper came from within the motionless
black hood at my side.

"Ilfautlatuer."

I heard it very well.

"What do you say, Doininic?" I asked,
moving nothing but my lips.

And the whisper within the hood repeated
mysteriously, "She must be killed."

My heart began to beat violently.

" That's it," I faltered out. " But how ?"

"You love her well?"

"I do."

"Then you must find the heart for that
work, too. You must steer her yourself,
and I shall see to it that she dies quickly,
without leaving as much as a chip be-
hind."

"Can you?" I murmured, fascinated by
the blaqk hood turned immovably over the
stem, as if in unlawful communion with
that old sea of magicians, slave - dealers,
exiles, and warriors, the sea of legends and
terrors, where the mariners of remote an-
297

The Mirror of the Sea

t^qui^y used to hear the restless sh^4e
of an old wg,nderer wpep aloud in the
dark.

"I Impw g, Foc]c,'' whisppred thie initiated
voice within the hood sppreljy. "Biit —
caution! It must be done tjefprp they per-
ceive what we are atjQut. Whpm caii we
^rust nqw? A knife jlrawft across the fore-
halyards would bring the foresail dQwn, and
put at^ end to our libeirty in twenty minutes.
And the best of our men may ^e afraid Qf
drowning. There is our little fcoat, but in
an affgir like thi§ no one can be sure of being
saved."

The voice ceased. We had started from
B3.rpelQna with our dinghy in tow; after-
wards it was too risky to try to get her ii^,
so we let her tajse her charice of the seas at
the eftd of a comfortable scope of rope.
Many times she had seemed to us com-
pletely oyerwtielmed, but soon we wojild see
her bob up ^gaiiT^ on a wave, appareiitly as
buoyant and whole as ever.

"I tpiderstand," I said, softly. "Very
well, Iiqiokp.c. When?"

-'tJpt yet. We rnust ge^ a lit|;le more iij
S98

The "Tremolino"

first," answered the voice from the hood in
a ghostly murmtir.

It was settled, I had now the courage to
turn about. Our men crouched about the
decks here and there with anxious, crest-
fallen faces, all turned one way to watch
the chaser. For the first time that morn-
ing I perceived Cesar stretched out full
length on the deck near the foremast, and
wondered where he had been skulking till
then. But he might in truth have been at
my elbow all the time for all I knew. We
had been too absorbed in watching our fate
to pay attention to one another. Nobody
had eaten anything that morning, but the
men had been coming constantly to drink
at the water-butt.

I ran down to the cabin. I had there,
put away in a locker, ten thousand francs in
gold, of whose presence on board, so far as I
was aware, not a soul except Dominic had
the slightest inMing. When I emerged on
deck again Dominic had turned about and
ao 299

The Mirror of the Sea

was peering from under his cowl at the
coast. Cape Creux closed the view ahead.
To the left a wide bay, its waters torn and
swept by fierce squalls, seemed full of smoke.
Astern the sky had a menacing look.

Directly he saw me, Dominic, in a placid
tone, wanted to know what was the matter.
I came close to him and, looking as uncon-
cerned as I could, told him in an undertone
that I had found the locker broken open
and the money-belt gone. Last evening it
was stiU there.

"What did you want to do with it?" he
asked me, trembling violently.

"Put it round my waist, of course," I an-
swered, amazed to hear his teeth chattering.

"Cursed gold!" he muttered. "The
weight of the money might have cost you
your life, perhaps." He shuddered. "There
is no time to talk about that now."

"I am ready."

"Not yet. I am waiting for that squall
to come over," he muttered. And a few
leaden minutes passed.

The squall came over at last. Our pur-
suer, overtaken by a sort of murky whirl-
300

The "Tremolino"

wind, disappeared from our sight. The
TremoUno quivered and bounded forward.
The land ahead vanished, too, and we
seemed to be left alone in a world of water
and wind.

"Prenez la barre, monsieur," Dominic
broke the silence suddenly in an austere
voice. "Take hold of the tiller." He bent
his hood to my ear. "The balancelle is
yours. Your own hands must deal the
blow. I — I have yet another piece of work
to do." He spoke up loudly to the man
who steered. "Let the signorino take the
tiller, and you with the others stand by to
haul the boat alongside quickly at the
word."

The man obeyed, surprised, but silent.
The others stirred, and cocked their ears up
at this. I heard their mtmnurs. "Whatl
now? Are we going to run in somewhere
and take to our heels ? The padrone knows
what he is doing."

Dominic went forward. He paused to
look down at Cesar, who, as I have said be-
fore, was lying full length face down by the
foremast, then stepped over him, and dived
301

The Mirror of the Sea

out of my sight under the foresail. I saw
nothing ahead. It was impossible for me
to see anything except the foresail open
and still, like a great shadowy wing. But
Dominic had his bearings. His voice came
to me from forward, in a just audible cry:

"Now, signorino!"

I bore on the tiller, as instructed before.
Again I heard him faintly, and then I had
only to hold her straight. No ship ran so
joyously to her death before. She rose and
fell, as if floating in space, and darted for-
ward, whizzing like an arrow. Dominic,
stooping under the foot of the foresail,
reappeared, and stood steadying himself
against the mast, with a raised forefinger in
an attitude of expectant attention. A sec-
ond before the shock his arm fell down by
his side. At that I set my teeth. And
then —

Talk of splintered planks and smashed
timbers! This shipwreck lies upon my soul
with the dread and horror of a homicide,
with the unforgettable remorse of having
crushed a living, faithful heart at a single
blow. At one moment the rush and the
30a

The "Tremolimo"

soaring swing of speed; the next a crash,
and death, stillness — a moment of horrible
immobility, with the song of the wind
changed to a strident wail, and the heavy
waters boding .up menacing and sluggish
around the corpise.; I saw in a distracting
minute the foreyard fly fore-and-aft with a
brutal swing, the men all in a heap, cursing
with fear, and hauling frantically at the line
of the boat. With a strange welcoming of
the familiar I saw also Cesar among them,
and recognized Dominic's old, well-known,
effective gesture, the horizontal sweep of his
powerful arm. I recoUect distinctly saying
to myself, "Cesar must go down, of course,"
and then, as I was scrambling on all fours,
the swinging tiller I had let go caught me a
crack under the ear, and knocked me over
senseless.

I don't think I was actually unconscious
for more than a few minutes, but when I
came to myself the dinghy was driving be-
fore the wind into a sheltered cove, two men
just keeping her straight with their oars.
Dominic, with his arm round my shoulders,
supported me in the stern-sheets.
303

The Mirror of the Sea

We landed in a familiar part of the coun-
try. Dominic took one of the boat's oars
with him. I suppose he was thinking of
the stream we would have presently to
cross, on which there was a miserable speci-
men of a punt, often robbed of its pole.
But first of all we had to ascend the ridge of
land at the back of the Cape. He helped
me up. I was dizzy. My head felt very
large and heavy. At the top of the ascent
I clung to him, and we stopped to rest.

To the right, below us, the wide, smoky
bay was empty. Dominic had kept his
word. There was not a chip to be seen
around the black rock from which the
Tremolino, with her plucky heart crushed
at one blow, had slipped off into deep water
to her eternal rest. The vastness of the
open sea was smothered in driving mists,
and in the centre of the thinning squall,
phantom-like, under a frightful press of can-
vas, the unconscious guardacosta dashed on,
•still chasing to the northward. Our men
were already descending the reverse slope to
look for that punt which we knew from ex-
perience was not always to be found easily.
304

The "Tremolino"

I looked after them with dazed, misty eyes.
One, two, three, four.

"Dominic, where 's Cesar?" I cried.

As if repulsing the very sound of the
name, the padrone made that ample, sweep-
ing, knocking-down gesture. I stepped back
a pace and stared at him fearfully. His
open shirt uncovered his muscular neck and
the thick hairon his chest. He planted the
oar upright in the soft soil, and rolling up
slowly his right sleeve, extended the bare
arm before my face.

"This," he began, with an extreme de-
liberation, whose superhuman restraint vi-
brated with the suppressed violence of his
feelings, "is the arm which delivered the
blow. I am afraid it is your own gold that
did the rest. I forgot all about your
money." He clasped his hands together in
sudden distress. "I forgot, I forgot," he
repeated, disconsolately.

"Cesar stole the belt?" I stammered out,
bewildered.

"And who else? CanaUia! He must
have been spying on you for days. And he
did the whole thing. Absent all day in
30s

The Mirror of the Sea

Barcelona, Traditore! Sold his jacket — ^to
hire a horse. Ha! ha! A good affair! I
tell you it was he who set him at us. ..."

Dominic pointed at the sea, where the
guardacosta was a mere dark speck. His
chin dropped on his breast.

"... On information," he murmured, in a
gloomy voice. "A Cervonil Oh! my poor
brother! ..."

"And you drowned him," I said, feebly.

" I struck once, and the wretch went down
like a stone — with the gold. Yes. But he
had time to read in my eyes that nothing
could save him while I was alive. And had
I not the right — I, Dominic Cervoni, pa-
drone, who brought him aboard yoiir f ellucca
— ^my nephew a traitor?"

He pulled the oar out of the ground and
helped me carefully down the slope. All
the time he never once looked me iri the
face. He punted us over, then shouldered
the oar again and waited till our men were
at some distance before he offered me his
arm. After we had gone a little way, the
fishing hamlet we were making for came into
view. Dominic stopped.
306

The "Tremolino"

"Do you think you can make your way
as far as the houses by yourself?" he asked
me, quietly.

"Yes, I think so. But why? Where are
you going, Dominic?"

"Anywhere. What a question! Signo-
rino, you are but little more than a boy to
ask such a question of a man having this
tale in his family. Ah! Traditore! What
made me ever own that spaAvn of a hungry
devil for our own blood! Thief, cheat,
coward, liar — other men can deal with that.
But I was his uncle, and so ... I wish he
had poisoned me — charogne! But this : that
I, a confidential man and a Corsican, should
have to ask your pardon for bringing on
board your vessel, of which I was padrone,
a Cervoni who has betrayed you — a traitor!
— that is too much. It is too much. Well,
I beg your pardon; and you may spit in
Dominic's face because a traitor of our
blood taints us all. A theft may be made
good between men, a lie may be set right, a
death avenged, but what can one do to
atone for a treachery like this? . , . Noth-
ing."

307

The Mirror of the Sea

He turned and walked away from me
along the bank of the stream, flourishing a
vengeful arm and repeating to himself slow-
ly, with savage emphasis: "Ah! Canaille!
Canaille! Canaille! ..." He left me there
trembling with weakness and mute with
awe. Unable to make a sound, I gazed
after the strangely desolate figure of that
seaman carrying an oar on his shoulder up a
barren, rock-strewn ravine under the dreary
leaden sky of TremoUno's last day. Thus,
walking deliberately, with his back to the
sea, Doniinic vanished from my sight.

With the quality of our desires, thoughts,
and wonder (proportioned to our infinite lit-
tleness, we measure even time itself by o^xc
own stature. Imprisoned in the house of
personal illusions, thirty centuries in man-
kind's history seem less to look back upon
than thirty years of our own life. And
Dominic Cervoni takes his place in my
memory by the side of the legendary wan-
derer on the sea of marvels and terrors, by
the side of the fatal and impious adventurer,
to whom the evoked shade of the soothsayer
predicted a journey inland with an oar on
308

The "Tremolino"

his shoulder, till he met men who had never
set eyes on ships and oars. It seems to me
lean see them side by side in the twilight
of an arid land, the unfortunate possessors
of the secret lore of the sea, bearing the em-
blem of their hard calling on their shoulders,
surrounded by silent and curious men: even
as I, too, having turned my back upon the
sea, am bearing those few pages in the twi-
light, with the hope of finding in an inland
valley the silent welcome of some patient
listener.

The Heroic Age

FELLOW has now no chance
of promotion unless he jtunps
into the muzzle of a gmi and
crawls out of the touch-hole."
He who, a hundred years
ago, more or less, pronounced the above
words in the uneasiness of his heart, thirst-
ing for professional distinction, was a young
naval officer. Of his life, career, achieve-
ments, and end, nothing is preserved for the
edification of his yoimg successors in the
fleet of to-day — nothing but this phrase,
which, sailor-like in the simplicity of per-
sonal sentiment and strength of graphic ex-
pression, embodies the spirit of the epoch.
This obscure but vigorous testimony has its
price, its significance, and its lesson. It
comes to us from a worthy ancestor. We
do not know whether he lived long enough
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for a chance of that promotion whose way
was so arduous. He belongs to the great
array of the unknown — who are great, in-
deed, by the sum total of the devoted effort
put out, and the colossal scale of success at-
tained by their insatiable and steadfast am-
bition. We do not know his name ; we only
know of him what is material for us to
know — that he was never backward on oc-
casions of desperate service. We have this
on the authority of a distinguished seaman
of Nelson's time. Departing this life as Ad-
miral of the Fleet on the eve of the Crimean
War, Sir Thomas Byam Martin has recorded
for us among his all too short autobiographi-
cal notes these few characteristic words ut-
tered by one young man of the many who
must have felt that particular inconvenience
of a heroic age.

The distinguished Admiral had lived
through it himself, and was a good judge of
what was expected in those days from men
and ships. A brilliant frigate captain, a
man of sound judgment, of dashing bravery
and of serene mind, scrupulously concerned
for the welfare and honor of the navy, he
3"

The Mirror of the Sea

missed a larger fame only by the chances of
the service. We may well quote on this
day the words written of Nelson, in the de-
cline of a well-spent life, by Sir T. B. Martin,
who died just fifty years ago on the very an-
niversary of Trafalgar.

"Nelson's nobleness of mind was a promi-
nent and beautiful part of his character.
His foibles — ^faults if you like — will never be
dwelt upon in any memorandum of mine,"
he declares, and goes on — "he whose splen-
did and matchless achievements will be re-
membered with admiration whUe there is
gratitude in the hearts of Britons, or while
a ship floats upon the ocean; he whose ex-
ample on the breaking out of the war gave
so chivalrous an imptilse to the younger men
of the service that all rushed into rivalry of
daring which disdained every warning of
prudence, and led to acts of heroic enter-
prise which tended greatly to exalt the glory
of our nation."

These are his words, and they are true.

The dashing young frigate captain, the man

who in middle age was nothing loath to give

chase single-handed in his seventy-four to a

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whole fleet, the man of enterprise and con-
summate judgment, the old Admiral of the
Fleet, the good and trusted servant of his
country under two kings and a queen, had
felt correctly Nelson's influence, and ex-
pressed himself with precision out of the ful-
ness of his seaman's heart.

"Exalted," he wrote, not "augmented."
And therein his feeling and his pen captured
the very truth. Other men there were
ready and able to add to the treasure of
victories the British navy has given to the
nation. It was the lot of Lord Nelson to
exalt all this glory. Exalt! the word seems
to be created for the man.

The British navy may well have ceased to
count its victories. It is rich beyond the
wildest dreams of success and fame. It
may well, rather, on a culminating day of
its history, cast about for the memory of
some reverses to appease the jealous fates
which attend the prosperity and triumphs!
of a nation. It holds, indeed, the heaviest
3^3

The Mirror of the Sea

inheritance that has ever been intrusted to
the courage and fidelity of armed men.

It is too great for mere pride. It should
make the seamen of to-day humble in the
secret of their hearts, and indomitable in
their unspoken resolution. In all the rec-
ords of history there has never been a time
when a victorious forttme has been so faith-
ful to men making war upon the sea. And
it must be confessed that on their part they
knew how to be faithful to their victorious
fortune. They were exalted. They were
always watching for her smile ; night or day,
fair weather or foul, they waited for her
slightest sign with the offering of their stout
hearts in their hands. And for the inspira-
tion of this high constancy they were in-
debted to Lord Nelson alone. Whatever
earthly affection he abandoned or grasped,
the great Admiral was always, before all,
beyond all, a lover of fame. He loved her
jealously, with an inextinguishable ardor
and an insatiable desire — he loved her with
a masterful devotion and an infinite trust-
fulness. In the plenitude of his passion he
was an exacting lover. And she never be-
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trayed the greatness of his trust! She at-
tended him to the end of his life, and he
died pressing her last gift (nineteen prizes)
to his breast, "Anchor, Hardy — anchor!"
was as much the cry of an ardent lover as of
a consummate seaman. Thus he would hug
to his breast the last gift of fame.

It was this ardor which made him great.
He was a flaming example to the wooers of
glorious fortune. There have been great
ofl&cers before — Lord Hood, for instance,
whom he himself regarded as the greatest
sea-officer England ever had. A long suc-
cession of great commanders opened the sea
to the vast range of Nelson's genius. His
time had come; and, after the great sea-offi-
cers, the great naval tradition passed into
the keeping of a great man. Not the least
glory of the navy is that it understood Nel-
son. Lord Hood trusted him. Admiral
Keith told him: "We can't spare you either
as Captain or Admiral." Earl St. Vincent
put into his hands, untrammelled by orders,
a division of his fleet, and Sir Hyde Parker
gave him two more ships at Copenhagen
than he had asked for. So much for the

The Mirror of the Sea

chiefs; the rest of the navy surrendered to
him their devoted affection, trust, and ad-
miration. In return he gave them no less
than his own exalted soul. He breathed into
them his own ardor and his own ambition.
In a few short years he revolutionized, not
the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the
very conception of victory itseif . And this is
genius. In that alone, through the fidelity
of his fortune and the power of his inspi-
ration, he stands unique among the leaders
of fleets and sailors. He brought heroism
into the line of duty. Verily he is a terrible
ancestor.

And the men of his day loved him. They
loved him not only as victorious armies
have loved great commanders; they loved
him with a more intimate feeling as one of
themselves. In the words of a contem-
porary, he had " a most happy way of gain-
ing the affectionate respect of all who had
the felicity to serve under his command."

To be so great and to remain so accessible
to the affection of one's fellow-men is the
mark of exceptional humanity. Lord Nel-
son's greatness was very human. It had a
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The Heroic Age

moral basis; it needed to feel itself sur-
rounded by the warm devotion of a band of
brothers. He was vain and tender. The
love and admiration which the navy gave
him so unreservedly soothed the restless-
ness of his professional pride. He trusted
them as much as they trusted him. He was
a seaman of seamen. Sir T. B. Martin
states that he never conversed with any
officer who had served under Nelson "with-
out hearing the heartiest expressions of at-
tachment to his person and admiration of
his frank and conciliatory manner to his
subordinates." And Sir Robert Stopford,
who commanded one of the ships with
which Nelson chased to the West Indies a
fleet nearly double in number, says in a let-
ter: "We are half -starved and otherwise in-
convenienced by being so long out of port,
but our reward is that we are with Nelson."
This heroic spirit of daring and endur-
ance, in which all public and private differ-
ences were sunk throughout the whole fleet,
is Lord Nelson's great legacy, triply sealed
by the victorious impress of the Nile, Copen-
hagen, and Trafalgar. This is a legacy
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The Mirror of the Sea

whose value the changes of time cannot
affect. The men and the ships he knew
how to lead lovingly to the work of courage
and the reward of glory have passed away,
but Nelson's uplifting touch remains in the
standard of achievement he has set for all
time. The principles of strategy may be
immutable. It is certain they have been,
and shall be again, disregarded from timidity,
from blindness, through infirmity of pur-
pose. The tactics of great captains on land
and sea can be infinitely discussed. The
first object of tactics is to close with the ad-
versary on terms of the greatest possible ad-
vantage; yet no hard and fast rules can be
drawn from experience, for this capital rea-
son, among others — ^that the quahty of the
adversary is a variable element in the prob-
lem. The tactics of Lord Nelson have been
amply discussed, with much pride and some
profit. And yet, truly, they are already of
but archaic interest. A very few years
more and the hazardous difficulties of hand-
ling a fleet tmder canvas shall have passed
beyond the conception of seamen who hold
in trust for their country Lord Nelson's
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The Heroic Age

legacy of heroic spirit. The change in the
character of the ships is too great and too
radical. It is good and proper to study the
acts of great men with thoughtful reverence,
but already the precise intention of Lord
Nelson's famous memorandum seems to lie
under that veil which Time throws over the
clearest conceptions of every great art. It
must not be forgotten that this was the first
time when Nelson, commanding in chief,
had his opponents under way — the first
time and the last. Had he Uved, had there
been other fleets left to oppose him, we
would, perhaps, have learned something
more of his greatness as a sea-officer. Noth-
ing could have been added to his greatness
as a leader. All that can be affirmed is,
that on no other day of his short and glori-
ous career was Lord Nelson more splendidly
true to his genius and to his country's
fortvme.

And yet the fact remains that, had the
wind failed and the fleet lost steerage-way,
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The Mirror of the Sea

or, worse still, had it been taken aback from
the eastward, with its leaders within short
range of the enemy's gtms, nothing, it
seems, could have saved the headmost ships
from capture or destruction. No skill of a
great sea-officer would have availed in such
a contingency. Lord Nelson was more than
that, and his genius would have remained
undiminished by defeat. But obviously tac-
tics, which are so much at the mercy of
irremediable accident, must seem to a
modem seaman a poor matter of study.
The commander-in-chief in the great fleet
action that will take its place next to the
battle of Trafalgar in the history of the
British navy will have no such anxiety, and
will feel the weight of no such dependence,
For a hundred years now no British fleet
has engaged the enemy in line of battle.
A hundred years is a long time, but the dif-
ference of modern conditions is enormous.
The gulf is great. Had the last great fight
of the English navy been that of the ist
of June, for instance, had there been no
Nelson's victories, it would have been well-
nigh impassable. The great Admiral's slight
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The Heroic Age

and passion-worn figure stands at the part-
ing of the ways. He had the audacity of
genius, and a prophetic inspiration.

The modern naval man must feel that the
time has come for the tactical practice of the
great sea-officers of the past to be laid by in
the temple of august meiiiories. The fleet
tactics of the sailing-days have turned on
two points: the deadly nature of a raking
fire, and the dread, natural to a commander
dependent upon the winds, to find at some
crucial moment part of his fleet thrown
hopelessly to leeward. These two points
were of the very essence of sailing tactics,
and these two points have been eliminated
from the modem tactical problem by the
changes of propulsion and armament. Lord
Nelson was the first to disregard them with
conviction and audacity sustained by an
imbounded trust in the men he led. This
conviction, this audacity, and this trust
stand out from among the lines of the cele-
brated memorandum, which is but a declara-
tion of his faith in a crushing superiority of
fire as the only means of victory and the
only aim of sound tactics. Under the diffi-
321

The Mirror of the Sea

culties of the then existing conditions he
strove for that, and for that alone, putting
his faith into practice against every risk.
And in that exclusive faith Lord Nelson ap-
pears to us as the first of the moderns.

Against every risk, I have said; and the
men of to-day, bom and bred to the use of
steam, can hardly realize how much of that
risk was in the weather. Except at the
Nile, where the conditions were ideal for en-
gaging a fleet moored in shallow water. Lord
Nelson was not lucky in his weather. Prac-
tically it was nothing but a quite unusual
failure of the wind which cost him his arm
during the Teneriffe expedition. On Trafal-
gar Day the weather was not so much un-
favorable as extremely dangerous.

It was one of these covered days of fitful
sunshine, of light, unsteady winds, with a
swell from the westward, and hazy in gen-
eral, but with the land about the Cape at
times distinctly visible. It has been my lot
to look with reverence upon the very spot
more than once, and for many hours to-
gether. All but thirty years ago, certain
exceptional circumstances made me very
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The Heroic Age

familiar for a time with that bight in the
Spanish coast which would be inclosed
within a straight line drawn from Faro to
Spartel. My well - remembered experience
has convinced me that, in that corner of the
pcean, once the wind has got to the north-
ward of west (as it did on the 20th, taking
the British fleet aback), appearances of
westerly weather go for nothing, and that it
is infinitely more likely to veer right round
to the east than to shift back again. It was
in those conditions that, at seven on the
morning of the 21st, the signal for the fleet
to bear up and steer east was made. Hold-
ing a clear recollection of these languid
easterly sighs rippling unexpectedly against
the run of the smooth swell, with no other
warning than a ten - minutes' calm and a
queer darkening of the coast-line, I cannot
think, without a gasp of professional awe,
of that fateful moment. Perhaps personal
experience, at a time of life when responsi-
bility had a special freshness and impor-
tance, has induced me to exaggerate to my-
self the danger of the weather. The great
Admiral and good seaman could read aright
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The Mirror of the Sea

the signs of sea and sky, as his order to pre-
pare to anchor at the end of the day suffi-
ciently proves; but, all the same, the mere
idea of these baffling easterly airs, coming
on at any time within half an hour or so,
after the Victory fired her first broadside, is
enough to take one's breath away, with the
image of the rearmost ships of both divi-
sions falling off, unmanageable, broadside
on to the westerly swell, and of two British
admirals in desperate jeopardy. To this
day I cannot free myself from the impres-
sion that, for some forty minutes, the fate
of the great battle hung upon a breath of
wind such as I have felt stealing from be-
hind, as it were, upon my cheek while en-
gaged in looking to the westward for the
signs of the true weather.

Never more shall British seamen going
into action have to trust the success of their
valor to a breath of wind. The God of gales
and battles favoring her arms to the last,
has let the sun of England's sailing-fleet and
of its greatest master set in unclouded
glory. And now the old ships and their
men are gone; the new ships and the new
324

The Heroic Age

men, many of them bearing the old, auspi-
cious names, have taken up their watch on
the stern and impartial sea, which offers no
opporttmities but to those who know how to
grasp them with a ready hand and an un-
daunted heart.

This the navy of the Twenty Years' War
knew well how to do, and never better than
when Lord Nelson had breathed into its
soul his own passion of honor and fame. It
was a fortunate navy. Its victories were
no mere smashing of helpless ships and
massacres of cowed men. It was spared
that cruel favor, for which no brave heart
had ever prayed. It was fortunate in its
adversaries. I say adversaries, for on this
day of proud memories we should avoid the
word "enemies," whose hostile sound per-
petuates the antagonisms and strife of na-
tions, so irremediable, perhaps, so fateful —
and also so vain. War is one of the gifts of
life; but, alas! no war appears so very neces-
sary when time has laid its soothing hand
32$

The Mirror of the Sea

upon the passionate misunderstandings and
the passionate desires of great peoples.
"Le temps," as a distinguished Frenchman
has said, "est un galant homme." He
fosters the spirit of concord and justice, in
whose work there is as much glory to be
reaped as in the deeds of arms.

One of them disorganized by revolution-
ary changes, the other rusted in the neglect
of a decayed monarchy, the two fleets op-
posed to us entered the contest with odds
against them from the first. By the merit
of our daring and our faithfulness, and the
genius of a great leader, we have in the
course of the war augmented our advantage
and kept it to the last. But in the exulting
illusion of irresistible might a long series of
military successes brings to a nation the less
obvious aspect of such a fortune may per-
chance be lost to view. The old navy in its
last days earned a fame that no belittling
malevolence dare cavil at. And this su-
preme favor they owe to their adversaries
alone.

Deprived by an ill-starred fortune of that
self-confidence which strengthens the hands
326

The Heroic Age

of an armed host, impaired in skill but not
in courage, it may safely be said that our
adversaries managed yet to make a better
fight of it in 1797 than they did in 1793.
Later still, the resistance offered at the Nile
was all, and more than all, that could be
demanded from seamen, who, unless blind
or without understanding, must have seen
their doom sealed from the moment that
the Goliath, bearing up under the bows of
the Guerrier, took up an inshore berth. The
combilned fleets of 1805, just come out of
port, and attended by nqthing but the dis-
turbing memories of reve^^es, presented to
our approach a determined fimnt, on which
Captain Blackwood, in a knightly spirit,
congratulated his admiral. By the exer-
tions of their valor our adversaries have
but added a greater lustre to our arms^^ No
friend could have done more, for even v\
war, which severs for a time all the senti-^
ments of human fellowship, this subtle bon^
of association remains between brave meii
— that the final testimony to the value ofi
victory must be received at the hands of
the vanquished.

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The Mirror of the Sea

Those that from the heat of that battle
sank together to their repose in the cdol
depths of the ocean would not understand
the watchwords of our day, would gaze
with amazed eyes at the engines of our
strife. AU passes, all changes: the ani-
mosity of peoples, the tactics of fleets, the
forms of ships ; and even the sea itself seems
to wear a different and diminished aspect
from the sea of Lord Nelson's daiy. In this
ceaseless rush of shadows and shades, that,
like the fantastic forms of clouds cast darkly
upon the waters on a windy day, fly past us
to fall headlong below the hard edge of an
implacable horizon, we must turn to the
national spirit, which, superior in its force
and continuity to good and evil forttme, can
alone give us the feeling of an enduring ex-
istence and of an invincible power against
the fates.

Like a subtle and mysterious elixir poured
into the perishable clay of successive gen-
erations, it grows in truth, splendor, and
potency with the march of ages. In its in-
corruptible flow all round the globe of the
earth it preserves from the decay and for-
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The Heroic Age

getfulness of death the greatness of our
great men, and among them the passionate
and gentle greatness of Nelson, the nature
of whose genius was, on the faith of a brave
seaman and distinguished Admiral, such as
to "Exalt the glory of our nation."

THE END